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MEDITATIONS 


ON THE 


ACTUAL STATE OF CHRISTIANITY, 


AND ON 


THE ATTACKS WHICH ARE NOW BEING 
| MADE UPON IT. 


By My Gul zat 


- TRANSLATED UNDER THE SUPERINTENDENCE OF THE AUTHOR, 


NEW YORK: 


CHARLES SCRIBNER & CO, 
654 BROADWAY, 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
- Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/meditationsonactOOguiz_0 


PREFACE. 


Wins I published, two years ago, the first 
series of these Weditations, the series which had 
for its object the essence of Christianity, “ that 
is to say, the natural problems to which Chris- 
tianity is the answer, the fundamental dogmas 
by which it solves those problems, and the 
supernatural facts upon which those dogmas 
repose,” I indicated the general plan of the 
work which I so commenced, and the order into 
which its different parts would be distributed. 

“Next to the essence of the Christian Relig- 
ion,” I said in my Preface, “comes its history ; 
and this will be the subject of a second series 
of Meditations, in which I shall examine the 
authenticity of the Scriptures; the primary 
causes of the foundation of Christianity ; Chris- 


tian faith, as it has always existed throughout 


4 PREFACE. 


its different ages and in spite of all its vicis- 
situdes; the great religious crisis in the six- 
teenth century, which divided the Church and 
Europe between Romanism and Protestantism; 
finally, those antichristian crises which, at dif: 
ferent epochs and in different countries, have 
set in question and imperiled Christianity it- 
self, but which dangers it has ever surmounted. 
The third Ratios of Meditations will be conse- 
crated to the study of the actual state of the 
Christian religion, its internal and external con- 
dition. I shall retrace the regeneration of Chris- 
tianity which occurred among us at the com- 
mencement of the nineteenth century, both in 
the Church of Rome and in the Protestant 
Churches; the impulse imparted to it at the 
same epoch by the Spiritualistic Philosophy 
that then began again to flourish, and the move- 
ment in the contrary direction which showed 
itself very remarkably soon afterward in the 
resurrection of Materialism, of Pantheism, of 


Skepticism, and in works of historical criticism, 


PREFACE, 5 


I shall attempt to determine the idea, and con- 
sequently, in my opinion, the fundamental error 
of these different systems, the avowed and active 
enemies of Christianity. Finally, in the fourth 
series of these Meditations, I shall endeavor to 
discriminate and to characterize the future des- 
tiny of the Christian religion, and to indicate 
by what course it is called upon to conquer 
completely, and to sway morally, this little 
corner of the universe, termed by us our earth, 
in which unfold themselves the designs and 
power of God, just as, doubtless, they do in an 
infinity of worlds unknown to us.” 

Stil adhering in its entirety to the plan 
which I thus proposed, I nevertheless now invert 
the order. I publish the Meditations concern- 
ing the actual state of Christianity before 
those which propose for their object its history. 
I am struck by two circumstances in the actual 
state of opinions upon religious questions. On 
the one side, the sentiments contrary to or fa- 


vorable to Christianity are defining themselves 


6 PREFACE. 


each day with greater precision. Beliefs become 
firmer beliefs; opinions hostile to them receive 
fuller developments. On the other side, vacil- 
lating minds are occupying themselves more 
and more with the struggle to which they are 
witnesses: minds, earnest at once and sincere, 
feel the disturbing influence of the doctrines 
hostile to Christianity; many again are uneasy 
at these doctrines, many demand a refuge from 
them, without finding it or daring to seek it in 
the essential facts and principles of the Chris. 
tian faith. Between the adversaries of Chris. 
tianity and its defenders the discussion grows 
each day in importance and gravity; and with 
it also grows the perplexity in the minds of the 
spectators. By setting in full light this actual 
state of the Christian religion, by comparing 
the forces at its disposal with those of the sys- 
tems that it combats, I proceed thither where 
the emergency is the greatest; I betake myself 
at once to the very field of battle. I shall after- 
ward resume the history of Christianity from 


PREFACE, 7 


its first establishment down to our own time, 
and then finally consider the prospect open to 
it in the future. 

I regard with very complicated feelings, with 
feelings of great perplexity, the actual state of 
my country; its intellectual and moral state as 
well as its social and its political state. I have 
a mind full at once of confidence and of dis- 
_ quietude, of hope and of alarm. Whether for 
good or for evil, the crisis in which the civilized 
world is plunged is infinitely more serious than 
our fathers predicted it would be; more so than 
even we, who are already experiencing from 
it the most different consequences, believe it 
ourselves to be. Sublime truths, excellent 
principles, are intrinsically blended with ideas 
essentially false and perverse. A noble work of 
progress, a hideous work of destruction, are in 
operation simultaneously in men’s opinions and 
in society. Humanity never so floated between 
heaven and the abyss. It is especially when I 


regard the generation now advancing, when I 


8 PREFACE, 


hear what they affirm, when I gather a hint of 
what they desire and hope for, it is especially 
then that I feel at once sympathy and anxiety. 
Sentiments of propriety and of generosity 
abound in those young hearts; they reject, 
when once convinced of their justice, neither 
the ideas which they before did not admit, nor 
‘the curb to which by the inspiration of the 
divine law even human ambition does not 
refuse to submit; but by a strange and deplor. 
able amalgam, good instincts and evil tenden- 
cies exist in them simultaneously; ideas the 
least reconcilable clash together, and persist in 
them at the same time. The Truth does not 
rid them of the error; a light indeed shines 
upon them, but out of a chaotic darkness which 
that light has not the power to dissipate. 

In the presence of this condition of men’s 
minds, under the impulse of the sentiment 
which it inspires, I publish this second series of 
Meditations, Tn touching upon the great ques: 
tions at present under debate in the philosoph- 


PREFAOE, 9 


ical world, in expressing my opinion concern- 
ing Rationalism, Positivism, Pantheism, Mate- 
rialism, Skepticism, I have not for a moment 
pretended to discuss these different systems 
completely and scientifically. Although I am 
convinced that they are no more in a condition 
to support any profound examination of severe 
reason than to stand the first regard of common 
sense, the object which I propose to myself is 
to indicate only their radical and incurable vice. 
This is no treatise of Metaphysics; it is only an 
appeal addressed to upright and independent 
minds; an appeal made to induce them to sub- 
ject science to the test of the human conscience, 
and to regard with distrust systems, which, in 
the name of a pretended scientific truth, would, 
between the intellectual order and the moral 
order, between the thought and the life of man, 
destroy the harmony established by the law of 


God. 


| GUIZOT. 
VAL-RicHER, April, 1866, 


ia i 


if 


CONTENTS. 
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MEDITATIONS 


ON THE AOTUAL STATE OF 


THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 


FIRST MEDITATION. 


THE AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE | 


IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

In 1797, La Réveillidre-Lépeaux, one of the 
five Directors who then constituted the govern- 
ment of France, having just read to that class 
of the Institut* of which he was a member 
a memorial respecting Theophilanthropism, and 
the forms suitable for this new worship, con- 
sulted Talleyrand upon the subject; the latter 


replied, “I have but a single observation to 


* The class of moral and political sciences. 


14 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


make: Jesus Christ, to found his religion, suf- 
fered himself to be crucified, and he rose 
again. You should try to do as much.” 

Nor was it long before events justified the 
ironical counsel. In 1802, hardly four years 
afterward, Theophilanthropism and its apostle, 
the dream and the dreamer, had disappeared 
from the stage where they had been powerless 
in influence, barren in consequence. The strong 
hand of Napoleon again solemnly set up in 
France the religion of Christ crucified and 
Christ risen, and in that same year the brilliant 
genius of Chateaubriand again placed before 
the eyes of his countrymen the beauties of Chris- 
tianity. The great politician and the great 
writer bowed each of them before the Cross : 
the Cross was the point from which each started 
—the one to reconstruct the Christian Church 
in France, the other to prove how capable a 
Christian writer is of charming French society 
and of stirring its emotions. 


In these days, and in some parts of Christen- 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 15 


dom, the Concordat and the “Génie du Chris- 
tianisme,” the one as a political institution, the 
other as a literary production, have lost some- 
thing of their vogue. Catholics, zealous and 
sincere, criticise severely the defects of the Con- 
cordat; they regard it as sometimes incomplete, 
sometimes tyrannical: they reproach it with 
assailing the rights of religious society, of para- 
lyzing its influence, and restricting its liberty. 
Some go so far as to express wishes for the 
separation of Church and State, and for their 
entire independence of each other, the only cer- 
tain guarantee to either, they affirm, of a real 
moral influence. Protestants, equally zealous 
and sincere, entertain the same opinions and the 
same wishes. Not contented with this, the 
latter have gone further, and acted; they have 
separated themselves from the Protestant Church 
recognized by the State, and have founded in- 
dependent Churches, self-governing and self-suf- 
ficing; nor have they demanded anything from 
the State but the liberty that is every citizen’s 


16 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


due. In a work recently published,* a pastor 
of one of these Churches, a man distinguished 
both by the elevation of his mind and the gen- 
erosity of his sentiments, M. Edmond de Pres- 


sensé, has gone still further. Not content with 
defending the principle of the separation of 
Church and State, he has endeavored to prove 
that, in 1802, the Concordat was, on the part 
of Napoleon, simply an act of tyranny and am- 
bition; that it was, as far as Christianity is 
concerned, an untoward incident; and that if 
the Christian Church, at the time spontaneously 
regenerating itself, had been left free and un- 
controlled, it would have risen by its own prop- 
er strength, and would have grown in influence 
and in faith far more than the Concordat has 
permitted it to do, I am far from proposing 
to discuss here, as a general proposition, the 
system of separation of Church and State, or its 


worth in a religious or social point of view; 


* L’figlise et la Révolution francaise, histoire des relations 
de ’Eglise et de ’Btat, de 1789-1802, 8vo. 1864. 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 17 


such a system I do not regard as the ideal of 
religious society: the co-existence, I would 
rather say the competition, of Churches recog- 
nized by the State and of Dissenting Churches 
independently constituting themselves and self. 
sufficing, is, in my opinion, the system most in 
conformity with the nature of things, and most 
: favorable to the solidity and general efficiency 
of religion. That is a question rather of epoch, 
time, manners, and social condition than of prin- 
ciple. But, however this may be, I hold it as 
certain that, in 1802, the Concordat was, on the 
part of Napoleon, far more an act of superior 
sagacity than of arbitrary power, and that it 
was for the Christian religion in France an 
event as salutary as necessary. After the 
anarchy and the orgies of the Revolution, 
nothing but the solemn recognition of Chris- 
tianity by the State could have given satisfaction 
to the public sentiment, and insured to the re- 
ligion of Christ the dignity and the stability, 


the recovery of which was so essential to its 
2 


18 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


influence. Nothing is more liable to error 
than an attempt to appreciate, with reference to 
present circumstances and the actual condition 
of men’s minds, what was possible and good 
sixty years ago; and I am convinced, that in 
spite of his zeal for the separation of Church 
and State, M. Edmond de Pressensé, had he 
lived in 1802, would have been as little satis- 
fied as France herself with a Christian Church 
restored in accordance with the plan of the Abbé 
Grégoire. The Concordat was a mixed and im- 
perfect measure, subject to grave objections, and 
the source of numberless difficulties; but, taken 
altogether, the measure was grand and salutary ; 
it gave at once to the Christian movement a 
sanction and an impulse that no other scheme 
would have been capable of imparting. | 

M. de Chateaubriand and the “Génie du 
Christianisme” are entitled to the same justice. 
I am ready, with regard to both book and 
author, to concede the truth of all the objec- 
tions and of all the defects that the severest 


- 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 19 


critic may be able or may wish to detect; their 
grand and salutary action will not be the less a 
living fact. It is with books as it is with men; 
it is by their qualities, whatever their faults, 
that they command position and exercise sway,: 
and wherever superior qualities are discernible, 
their efficacy remains in spite of any faults, in 
spite of any defects, by which they may be ac- 
companied, Notwithstanding its imperfections 
in a religious and literary point of view, the 
“Génie du Christianisme” was in both these 
respects a performance at the same time remark- 
able and powerful: it strongly moved men’s 
minds, it gave a fresh impulse to men’s imagi- 
nations, it reanimated and placed in their prop- 
er rank the traditions and the early impres- 
sions of Christianity. No criticism, however 
legitimate, can ever deprive that work of the 
place that it at once assumed in the religious 
and the literary history of its time and country. 

Neither the Concordat nor the “Génie du 


Christianisme ” Was, in 1802, the result of a 


20 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


spirit of blind and barren reaction. Napoleon 
and Chateaubriand were both of them hardy 
innovators. At the side of the ancient religion 
which he re-established, Napoleon firmly main- 
tained also the liberty of conscience, whether 
in matters of worship or philosophy. At the 
very instant when the Concordat was proclaimed 
and the “ Génie du Christianisme” was published, 
the learned physiologist, Cabanis, also published 
his treatise on the relations of man’s physical 
and moral nature, a work which characterized 
man as a mere machine. And in recalling 
France to an admiration of the beauties of Chris- 
tian literature, Chateaubriand imaged them to 
her in forms of language so novel and so orig- 
inal, that many among the severe guardians of 
the French language treated him as an outrage- 
ous and barbarous writer. A new era opened 
at this epoch in France for religion and for lit- 
erature. Christianity and systems opposed to 
Christianity, Roman Catholicism, Protestant- 


ism, and Philosophy, a taste for classics, and a 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 21 


tendency to romanticism, unfolded themselves 
simultaneously, surprised to be living together, 
and at the same time encountering one another 
as ardent combatants. 

I have no design to retrace here their con- 
tests nor to constitute myself their judge. Let 
but a great arena be thrown open, and the 
crowd rushes in, carrying with it its confusion 
and its buzz. Happily, the tumult is not of 
long duration. In this mighty movement of 
men’s minds in France at the commencement of 
the nineteenth century I occupy myself with a 
single grand fact—the Awakening of Chris- 
tianity, its different characteristics, its different 
results. The crisis itself had illustrious wit- 
nesses. I will interrogate these alone. 

After Napoleon and Chateaubriand, the first 
whom I meet with are two Catholic writers, 
who have left behind them great and deserved 
reputations. M. de Bonald and M. de Maistre 
_ hoisted the banner of Christianity valiantly, and 
at an early date. But their ideas and their 


22 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


writings were rather political than religious: 
the exigencies of public order occupied their 
attention far more than those of man’s soul, 
and their works were rather attacks upon the 
French Revolution than a defense of the faith 
of Christians. By a coincidence very remark- 
able, although at the same time very natural, 
the first production of each — “The Theory of 
Power,” by M. de Bonald, and the “ Considera- 
. tions on France,” by M. de Maistre—was pub- 
lished at the same moment, in 1796, and each 
in a foreign land, where the authors were living 
as emigrants. In the first ardor of the reaction, 
and with the impassioned and vague feelings 
that it suggested, each wrote against the Revo. 
lution that shook the world and wrecked his 
own fortunes. Potent intelligences both, pro- 
found moralists, eminent writers; but their 
philosophy is a philosophy of circumstance and 
of party. Their theories they use as arms; their 
books as a discharge. M. de Bonald is a lofty- 


minded original thinker, but subtle, too, and 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 238 


complex; disposed to content himself with 
verbal combinations and distinctions, and spar- 
ing no labor to contrive his vast web of ar- 
guments proper to entrap the unwary adver- 
sary. M. de Maistre, on the contrary, blasts 
him with the absoluteness of his assertion, the 
poignancy of his irony, the rude eloquence of 
his invectives. He is a powerful, a charming 
extemporizer. Both of them excel in seizing 
and presenting in a striking manner one great 
side, but only one of the great sides, in questions 
or measures. They see not these in their variety 
and in their entirety. Combatants approved 
—the one tenacious, the other impetuous— 
they both committed two grave faults: they 
instituted a closer bond between statesmanship 
and religion than is proper or suitable to either; 
they could not discover any other remedy for 
anarchy than absolutism. In the natural and 
“never-ending conflict of the two ereat forces 
whose co-existence imparts vital energy to 


human society 


authority and liberty—they 


4 


94 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


declared for the former alone, thus ignoring the 
right of thought, the spirit of our times, and 
the general course of Christian civilization. 
When attacked in her essence, Religion should 
be defended as she was founded, in herself and 
for herself, setting aside every political consid- 
eration, and in the name alone of the prob- 
lems which lay siege to man’s soul, and of the 
relations of man’s soul with God. “Render 
unto Cesar the things which are Cesar’s, and 
unto God the things that are God’s,” said Jesus 
to the Pharisees when they sought to embarrass 
and +o compromise him politically. Thus did 
Jesus himself define the proper and paramount 
characteristic of his work. He did not come 
to destroy or to found any government; he 
came to feed, to regulate, and to save the human 
soul, leaving to time and to the natural efficacy 
of events the development of the social conse- 
quence of his religious faith and of his religious 
law. M. de Bonald and M. de Maistre joined 
too often together God and Cesar. They 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 25 


thought too much of Cesar while defending 
God. In doing this they changed and com- 
promised the character of that great movement, 
the Awakening of Christianity, which their 
conduct otherwise provoked and served.* 


After these two great writers, another great 


* “The dead move quick,” says the poet Birger in his ballad 
of Leonora. The men and the books I record died at a period 
already distant from us; and in spite of their fame that abides, 
they are probably little known to the generation at present in 
possession of the stage. I regard it, therefore, as not improper 
for me to mention below the titles of their principal works, of 
which I have in the text sought to determine the true character. 

Those of M. de Bonald are: . 

1. La Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux. 3 vols. 8vo. 
Constance : 1796. 

2, La Législation primitive. 3 vols. 8vo. Paris: 1821. 

3, L’Essai sur le divorce. 1 vol. 8vo. Paris. 

4, Les Recherches philosophique. 2 vols. 8vo. 1818 and 1826. 

5. Les Mélanges littéraires et politiques, 2 vols, 8vo. 

6. Pensées et discours. 2 vols. 8vo. 

All these writings, with some others, have been collected in 
the complete edition of the works of M. de Bonald, in seven 
volumes. 8vo. Paris: 1854. 

The principal works of M. de Maistre are: 

1. Considérations sur la France. 1 vol. 8vo. 1796. 

2, Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques 
et des autres institutions humaines. 1 vol. 8vo, 1810. 

8. Du Pape. 2 vols. 8vo. 1819. 


26 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


writer, (shall I term him Catholic?) the Abbé 
de la Mennais, placed himself upon the ‘same 
path, but to arrive at a very different issue. He, 
too, made authority alone the basis of man’s 
faith and of human society; but seeking to as- 
certain the sign which distinguishes legitimate 
authority, and which entitles it to unarguing 
submission, he fixed this sign in the general and 
traditional assent of mankind. “The common 
consent or authority, there,” said he, “we find 
the natural rule of our judgment; and what 
but folly can reject that rule, and listen to its 
own reason in preference to the reason of all ? 
... Lhe search for certitude is the search for a 
reason not liable to error at all, that is, for a 
reason that is infallible. Now this infallible 
reason must necessarily be either the reason of 


4. De Bglise gallicane dans son rapport avec le souverain 
pontife. 8vo. 1821. 

5. Examen de la philosophie de Bacon. 2 vols. 8vo. 1836. 

6. Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg. 2 vols. 8vo. 
| 7, Lettres et opuscules inédits, 2 vols. 8vo. 1851. 

8. Mémoires politiques et correspondance du comte de 
Maistre, publi¢s par M, Albert Blanc, 2 vols, 8yo, 1858. 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 27 


each individual or the reason of all men; in fact, 
of human reason. It is not the reason of each 
individual, for men contradict one another, and 
nothing frequently is more discordant and more 
contradictory than their judgments; therefore it 
is the reason of all.”* 

In holding this language in his very first 
work, the Abbé de la Mennais was already for- 
getting that he was a Christian and a Catholic. 
When a man demands here below an infallible 
authority, he must not seek it from any human 
source. The reason of all? (That is, the 
reason of the majority of men in all the ages 
of the world, for the reason of ali is a fallacy.) 
What is such reason, but the sovereignty of 
superior numbers in the spiritual order? Having 
fixed his principle, the Abbé de la Mennais kept 
it in sight everywhere. After having estab- 
lished an infallible authority in the name of 


the reason of all, he proclaimed the absolute 


* Essai sur Vindifférence en matiére de religion, t. i, p. 59. 4 
Défense de ]’Essai sur Vindifférence, chap. x, pp. 133-148. 


28 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


sovereignty in the name of universal suffrage. 
But this apostle of universal reason was at the - 
same time the proudest worshiper of his own 
reason. Under the pressure of events without, 
and of an ardent controversy, a transformation 
took place in him, marked at once by its logical 
deductions and its moral inconsistency: he 
changed his camp without changing his prin- 
ciples; in the attempt to lead the supreme 
authority of his Church to admit his principles 
he had failed; and from that instant the very 
spirit of revolt that he had so severely rebuked 
broke loose in his soul and in his writings, 
finding expression at one time in an indignation 
full of hatred leveled at the powerful, the rich, 
and the fortunate ones of the world; at another 
time in a tender sympathy for the miseries of 
humanity. The “ Words of a Believer” are the 
eloquent outburst of this tumult in his soul. 
Plunged in the chaos of sentiments the most 
contradictory, and yet claiming to be always 


consistent with himself, the champion of au- 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 29 


thority became in the State the most baited of 
democrats, and in the Church the haughtiest 
of rebels. 

It is not without sorrow that I thus express 
my unreserved opinion of a man of superior 
talent—mind lofty, soul intense; a man in the 
sequel profoundly sad himself, although haughty 
in his very fall. One cannot read in their 
stormy succession the numerous writings of the 
Abbé de la Mennais without recognizing in 
them traces, I will not say of his intellectual 
-perplexities—his pride did not feel them—but 
of the sufferings of his soul, whether for good 
or for evil. A noble nature, but full of exag- 
geration in his opinions, of fanatical arrogance, 
and of angry asperity in his polemics. One 
title to our gratitude remains to the Abbé de la 
Mennais—he thundered to purpose against the 
gross and vulgar forgetfulness of the great 
moral interests of humanity. His essay on indif- 
ference in religious questions inflicted a rude 


blow upon that vice of the time, and recalled 


30 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


men’s souls to regions above. And thus it was 
that he, too, rendered service to the great move- 
ment and awakening of Christians in the nine- 
teenth century, and that he merits his place in 
that movement although he deserted it.* 

At the same time that great minds were thus at 
work in order to restore to the belief in Christi- 
anity and the belief in Catholicism its honor and 
its authority, another influence was operating in 
the same direction, with less notoriety but no less 


effect. The Jesuits were re-establishing themselves 


* The principal works of the Abbé de la Mennais are: 

1. L’Essai sur V’indifférence en matiére de religion, avec la 
défense de PEssai. 5 vols. 8vo. The first volume appeared. 
in 1817. * 

2. De la Religion considérée dans ses rapports avec ordre 
civil et politique. 1 vol. 8vo. 1825, 

3. Les Paroles d’un Croyant. 8yo. 1834. 

4, Les Affaires de Rome. 8yo. 1836. 

0. Esquisse d’une philosophie. 4 vols. 8vo. 1841-1846. 

All his works, including numerous pamphlets and articles 
published in religious and political journals, have been collected 
in two editions: one in 12 vols. 8vo., 1836-1837 ; the other in 
11 vols. 8vo., 1844 and following years, Besides the above, 
there are his Posthumous Works, 2 vols, 8yo., 1856, and his Cor- 
respondence, 2 vols. 8vo., 1858. 


# 
AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 31 


in France—were founding houses of education 
and noviciates for their order—were opening 
chapels, preaching, teaching, careless of the exist- 
ence in France of laws proscribing them; occu- 
pying themselves solely with fulfilling what they 
regarded as a duty, and a duty, too, springing 
from a right believed by them to be superior to 
the laws. That duty for them was to uphold 
the Church of Rome; that right was the right 
of preaching and teaching, according to the farth 
of the Church. The Jesuits have also been con- 
sidered and represented as politicians in the 
garb of monks, rather than genuine members of 
the monastic orders. Often, in effect, in their 
acts and in their words, they have appeared as 
politicians, and politicians, too, with a certain 
indulgence for the world and the world’s 
masters; but, at bottom, they have been and 
they are essentially monastic—an order per- 
haps the most ardent of all, for they are of all 
orders the order most completely devoted to the 


cause of religious authority. 


32 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


There are commonplaces that have to be con- 
tinually repeated, so apt are men to forget them. 
In religious society, as well as in civil society, 
there are two great moral forees—Authority 
and Liberty; these coexist of necessity—have 
dominion turn by turn, and have alternately 
their heroes and their martyrs. Regarded either 
with respect to its political or religious con- 
stitution, society cannot long dispense with either — 
Authority or with Liberty; and each of these 
two forces is liable to abuse its influence, and to 
lose it by the very abuse. 

When Authority has had a long dominion, 
and its abuse too has been long, a reaction 
occurs: Liberty has her revenge; but in her 
turn is prone to compromise her interests by 
abuses and by excess. It is the history of all 
human society; facts prove it quite as much as 
common sense foretells it. In the bosom of this 
general fact it is the peculiar character, as it is 
the glory, of Christianity that it has fully ac- 


cepted these two rival forces; and the one in 


we 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 33 


the face of the other—authority and liberty— 
both of divine origin. Christianity has con- 
- Stantly accounted them for such as they are— 
the one the revealed law of God, the other the 
innate right of man, whom God created free and 
responsible. The history of the Jews is only 
that of the intimate and continued relations be- 
tween God as sovereign and man as free agent: 
God uttering and giving the law, man using his 
liberty at one time to fulfill, at another to re- 
ject, the law of God. When the great day of 
humanity dawned and Jesus came, it was in 
liberty’s name, and in claiming the right of the 
soul to obey the divine law according fo its 
convictions, that Christianity engaged in its 
primitive struggle of three centuries. Under 
this banner, too, it conquered, and under it 
religious society and civil society combined 
without becoming identical, The tempestuous 
and painful fecundity of the middle ages suc- 
ceeded to the tyrannical unity of the Roman 


empire, so sterile in result. Hence principles 
3 


34 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANOE. 


the most inconsistent, issues the most contra- 
dictory—the power of religion and the power 
of the state—popes and kings now supporting, 
now combating each other’s ambitious pur- 
poses, and thwarting each other’s measures, 
without any regard to law or right; liberty 
sometimes suffering cruelly by their alliance, 
sometimes happily profiting by their dissensions; 
on some occasions popes, on others monarchs 
protecting liberty against their reciprocal pre- 
tensions and excesses. Spiritual and temporal 
princes still wavered in their maxims and in 
their policy, and did not during the middle 
ages Systematically and on all occasions form 
coalitions, of which liberty was to pay the cost. 
Liberty, on the contrary, continued to subsist 
and to grow in the midst of their rivalries and 
of her own sufferings. But these rivalries and 
these sufferings produced a chaos which re- 
curred incessantly, and became ever more and 
more intolerable, precisely on account of the 


progress still made, and which no effort could 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 85 


stifle. The great body of Christians at last 
demanded some issue from this chaos; then 
those who wielded the religious power and the 
civil power, now separately, now in concert, 
endeavored to satisfy the craving of the world; 
and by their councils, pragmatic sanctions, encyc- 
lical letters and concordats, sought to reform the 
abuses and the grievances which, as men loudly 
proclaimed, existed, if not in the Church itself, 
at least in the relations of the Church with the 
State. Whether from want of wisdom, virtue, 
courage, or sagacity in their authors, or from 
their measures being too superficial, or meeting 
with too much opposition, those attempts failed ; 
and the reform that was to have proceeded from 
Authority herself remained without accomplish- 
ment. ‘Then came the reform by insurrection, 
in the name of Faith and Liberty; and as hap- 
pens in similar crises, whether of the Church or 
the State, the supreme authority of Romanism 
was attacked, not only in its abuses and its 


vices, but in its principle and its very existence, 


36 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


Rome then committed the fault almost always 
committed by Power when seriously menaced— 
it defended itself by pushing its principle and 
its right to the extreme, without holding account 
of any other principle or of any other right. In 
the name of Unity and Infallibility in matters 
of faith, the supreme power in the Church of 
Rome allied itself with the absolute power in 
the State, and supported the latter in its resist- 
ance to liberty. Under the inspiration of their 
founder and hero, Loyola, whose genius was 
that of a fanatic and a mystic, but who was 
adroit in organizing and realizing his design, 
the order of the Jesuits sprung into existence. 
This order was born of this war and for this 
war—a chosen troop, charged in the name of 
the faith to be the uncompromising defenders 
of authority in Church and in State. 

Since that epoch three centuries have passed, 
and the fourth is in its turn sweeping by us; 
neither times nor chances have been wanting 


to causes to produce their effects, nor to men 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 387 


to accomplish their designs; principles and 
events have received their development over a 
vast space; and in the light of heaven the differ. 
ent systems have been put to the test of suc- 
cesses and of reverses. Absolutism has had its 
triumphs and its victories; more than once the 
faults of its adversaries have played into its 
hands, and it has found able and glorious 
champions. It has not succeeded in arresting 
the course of a civilization full of liberty and 
yet still greedy to have more. It has taken its 
place in the midst of liberty as a temporary 
necessity, never as a preponderating tendency. 
More than this, even in the epochs when its 
influence was its height, and its splendor the 
oreatest, Absolutism has often served the cause 
hostile to its own. Louis XIV. seconded the 
movement of mind and the people’s progress ; 
Napoleon sowed in every direction the germs 
of social advancement or innovation. And now, 
even there, where liberty does not exist, Abso- 


lutism does not avow itself; it furls its banner, 


¥ 


388 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


and admits institutions contrary to its princi 
ples, reserving to itself the right to elude, or 
to render them powerless. Experience has pro- 
nounced its judgment; whatever the problems 
that the future will have to solve, or the trials 
which the future will have to encounter, the 
cause of Absolutism is a lost cause throughout 
Christendom. 

At the commencement of this century, the 
Jesuits, unfortunately for them, and yet very 
naturally, were regarded as devoted to that 
cause. After having served it in the eighteenth 
century, they had been the first victims of its 
decline; the papal and the monarchical sover- 
eignty had sacrificed them to the new opinions, 
just as mariners in a tempest throw overboard. 
their heavy ordnance. When the nineteenth 
century opened, all was greatly changed ; ‘the 
Revolution was not only victorious, but earnestly 
engaged in conciliating parties by disavowing 
and making amends for its excesses. After the 


commission of so many follies and crimes in the. 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 389 


pursuit of liberty, France submitted once more 
with the greatest satisfaction to the voice of 
authority. 

How would they then reconstruct that French 
policy that had been at once so overthrown and 
so regenerated? By what means would they 
conciliate new and ancient ideas, new and an- 
cient interests? Upon what terms would Au- 
thority and Liberty consent to be reconciled, 
and to live henceforth side by side—Authority 
soaring triumphant after her fall, Liberty em- 
barrassed with her recent excesses; and yet both 
of them more than ever necessary to society, if 
society was to be healthy and strong? This was 
evidently the vital question of the new- century. 
God placed its solution at first in the hands 
of Napoleon, the crown and the scourge of the 
Revolution, the most remarkable example at 
once of reaction and of progress recorded in the 
history of the world. 

In this condition, so new to France, the sit- 


uation of the Jesuits was embarrassing and 


40 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


perilous. Napoleon was again re-establishing 
the Church of Rome, and at the same time en- 
forcing the maxims of Absolutism—a double 
title to their sympathy. On the other hand, 
he was consolidating the Revolution, and main- 
taining and putting into practice some of its 
essential principles, among others, that of free- 
dom of conscience. Napoleon arrogated also 
to himself the right of dictating and acting as 
master in the Church as in the State, at Rome 
as at Paris; he was neither a serious believer 
in the faith of Christ nor a sure friend of the 
Papacy. In this twofold aspect, the Jesuits 
could not but regard him with distrust. The 
distrust was mutual: for if Napoleon was for 
the Jesuits a too faithful and too ambitous heir 
of the Revolution, the Jesuits were for him 
~ Catholics too independent and too devoted to 
their Church and to its chief, As far back as 
1804, their establishments, scarcely disguised 
under different names, had been a source of dis- 
quietude to Napoleon. He directed them to be 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 41 


closed, enforced the laws which denied to relig- 
ious corporations an independent existence, 
and founded the University, which at the same 
time he invested with the privilege of teaching. 

This system was not abolished at the Restora- 
tion. The Jesuits then entered into the simul- 
taneous possession of two forces novel to them 
—the one sprang from the support of power, 
the other was derived from the progress of 
liberty. They had the favor of the court, and 
might wield as their own arms, and in their own 
interests, the liberal principles that were dear to 
the people. A position excellent, had they 
known how to restrict themselves to their 
religious mission, keep aloof from political con- 
tests, and devote themselves exclusively to the 
task of awakening the faith of Christians, and 
arousing them to a Christian life! ‘Their action 
upon the soul might have extended their in- 
fluence beyond their peculiar sphere to the 
world without. Had they not then a striking 


instance of such an influence even in their own 


42 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


order? To what cause, thirty years ago, did the 
Pére Ravignan owe the respect and moral 
authority with which he was surrounded, not 
only by members of his own Church, but by 
men not remarkable for their faith? Far less to 
his talent as an orator, than to the thorough 
sincerity and disinterestedness of his religious 
character. He was a believer, a pious Christian, 
and a stranger to every mental reservation; 
neither was he a partisan, but solely occupied 
with the service of God, of his Church, and of 
his order, at the same time that he was pro- 
pagating the faith and enforcing piety. He 
declared. himself aloud a Jesuit, but the declara- 
tion excited no distrust even in his adversaries. 
If his order had imitated his example, it would 
have obtained a similar success. Nor was the 
instance new. In the seventeenth century, at 
the court of Louis XIV., Bourdaloue displayed 
the same virtues as the Pére Ravignan in our 
own days; and, in all certitude, did more honor 


and rendered more service to his Church and 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 43 


order than had ever been done or rendered by 
Pére la Chaise. 

I shall not attempt to examine how far the 
Jesuits in effect were really engaged, or what 
was the degree of their direct agency in the in- 
trigues of the retrograde party who were seek. 
ing to repossess themselves of the relics of the 
ancient institutions, in the idle hope of recon- 
structing the social edifice upon those ruined 
foundations. I am convinced that France felt 
at this epoch far too much alarm for this party 
and its allies, Jesuits or no Jesuits, just as the 
Monarchy itself felt too much apprehension of 
the Revolutionists. No graver fault can be 
committed by nations or by governments than 
to give way to fears out of proportion with the 
dangers which they encounter. France had no 
reason under the Restoration to dread either 
_the triumph of Theocracy or of Absolutism ; and. 
yet she was alarmed at both, and the people 
persisted in believing that the Jesuits were 


serving this double cause—that of the ancient 


44. AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


régime of the Papacy, and of the ancient régime 
of the Monarchy. The Jesuits had then to 
struggle at once against the ideas and the pas- 
sions of modern society, and the traditions and 
maxims of ancient France herself; they had for 
adversaries, the laity, the bar, and the liberals, 
respectively represented by M. de Montlosier, 
M. Benjamin Constant, and M. Dupin. The 
odds against them were too great; even the 
Monarchy itself, however well disposed toward 
them, was carried away by the movement which 
attacked them, and Charles X. did not think 
his own position strong enough to dispense with 
treating them, by his ordonnances of the 21st 
June, 1828, as Napoleon had done by his decree 
of the 22d June, 1804. Throughout this whole 
period the conduct of the Jesuits was feebler 
than their cause. Sworn and devoted to the 
defense of Authority, they had not foresight 
enough to perceive by what means and on 
what conditions Authority might raise and 
consolidate itself. Haunted by the traditions 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 45 


of past times, and having the history of their 
own order continually before their minds, they 
no longer regarded the future boldly or con- 
fidently; they failed to appreciate justly the 
present; they did not believe sufficiently nm 
the power of Christ’s faith, and they believed 
too implicitly in the efficiency of worldly policy. 
By this vulgar blunder they compromised, in 
the case of many Christians, the full effect of 
that great stirrmg movement of Christianity, 
at the very time that, with respect to others, 
they aided it materially. 

The Revolution of 1830 inflicted a rude 
blow upon these retrograde tendencies, and a 
new element started up in the bosom of the 
Church of Rome. In the midst of the grand 
manifestation and progress of liberty now real- 
izing itself in the State, Catholics, genuine and 
ardent too, conceived the hope of turning both 
to the profit of the Church of Rome, and of 
at last setting Catholicism at peace and in 


harmony with the new social institutions 


46 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 
_ 


of France. Then the group, I will not say the 
party, formed itself of men at once generous 
and hardy, who did not hesitate to declare 
themselves Ultramontanists, like the Pére de 
Ravignan, Liberals like M. de la Fayette. It 
consisted of priests and laymen, of men of 
mature years and men in the spring-time of life 
—the Abbé Lacordaire, Abbe Gerbet, M. de 
Montalembert, and M. de Coux: I confine my- 
self to the names that at the outset gleamed on 
their banners, They founded an agency for the 
defense of the liberties of religion, and a journal, 
the Avenir, to develop its principles and its 
constitution. But the association was born 
under an unlucky star; for its little army had 
for its declared chief, and the object of its 
passionate reverence, the Abbe de la Mennais. 
Tn the more intimate and unrestricted relations 
of life this great man appears to have exercised 
extraordinarily attractive power over his friends 
and disciples. Cited jointly with him on the 
31st January, 1831, before the Cour d’Assises 


AWAKENING OF OHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 47 


of Paris to answer for the appearance of two 
articles in the Avenir, the Abbé Lacordaire 
said, “I stand here near the man who began 
the reconciliation of Catholicism with the 
world. Let me tell him how affected I am by 
the part that God has made for me in giving me 
him as my master and my father. Suffer these 
words of filial piety to penetrate to the heart 
of one so long misunderstood; suffer me to 


exclaim with the poet: 
“T’amitié d’un grand homme est un bienfait des dieux.” * 


The Abbé Lacordaire had soon to feel the 
danger and to repel with sorrow the yoke 
of this seductive friendship. The errors and 
the evil passions of the Abbé de la Mennais 
were not long in exploding; his was a mind 
lofty and powerful, but without grasp, without 
foresight, without moderation, and without 
equity; incapable of discerning the different 


sides of a subject and of embracing all the 


*“A great man’s friendship, blessed gift of Heaven.” 


48 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANORE, 


elements of the problem demanding solution, 
he was a haughty slave to the truth that he 
served but partially, and the somber enemy of 
every one who wounded his pride by contesting 
his opinions. He gave to the Avenér a character 
at once democratic and theocratic, imperious 
and revolutionary. All the ideas contrary to 
his own, all the institutions, all the govern- 
ments, that stood in his way, were attacked by 
him with a degree of vehemence, insult, and 
menace never surpassed by any political partisan, 
however violent. The maxims of the Gallican : 
Church were, to cite his words, “an _ object 
of disgust and horror; opinions as odious as 
they were base, which, while rendering even the 
conscience the accomplice of tyranny, make ser- 
vility a duty and brute force an independent 
and just right.” He demanded the separation 
of Church and State as a necessity absolute and 
urgent; “for,” said he, “we regard as abolished 
and of no effect every particular law which 


contradicts the Charter, and is incompatible 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 49 


with the liberties that 7 proclaims. In the 
event of such law, we believe that it becomes 
immediately and without delay the duty of 
government to come to an understanding with 
the pope, and to rescind the Concordat, which 
lost all the means of being executed from the 
instant when, thank God, the Catholic religion 
ceased to be a state religion.” Four months had 
scarcely elapsed since the birth of the govern- 
ment of July, and because the liberty of teach- 
ing promised by the Charter of 1830 was not 
already in vigor, the Abbé de la Mennais said 
to the Catholics: “Whence comes the oppres- 
sion that weighs upon us? Either, in what 
concerns us, the government cannot or it will 
not keep its promises. If it cannot, what is this 
mockery of a sovereignty, this miserable phan- 
tom of government, and what have we to do 
with it? It is as far as we are concerned as 
if it were not, and nothing remains to us but to 
forget it, and seek our safety in ourselves. Let 


us proclaim aloud who the powers are that 
4 


50 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


are hostile to us; whose servants seek only to 
satisfy blindly their thirst for persecution.” 
What attacks leveled at a government were 
ever more precipitate, more violent, and showed 
a less just appreciation of facts? What revolu- 
tionary party ever proclaimed with greater 
audacity disobedience to the laws, and insur- 
rection as the first of rights and of duties ? 
Side by side with these violent and insulting 
invectives leveled at the government of France, 
the Avenir placed a declaration of respect and 
submission to the chief of the Church of Rome: 
“We profess,” it said, “the most complete obe- 
dience to the authority of the Vicar of Jesus 
Christ. We will not have other faith than his 
faith, other doctrine than his doctrine. All 
that he approves we approve, all that he con- 
demns we condemn, and without the shadow 
of a reservation; we, each of us, submit to the 
judgment of the Holy See all our past, all our 
future writings, of what nature soever they 


may be.” Here, at least, the revolutionary 


* 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 51 


spit seemed absent, or, at all events, was in a 
hurry to disavow itself. 

I am persuaded that, in holding this language, 
the Abbé de la Mennais was sincere. When 
an exclusive idea or passion sways a man’s 
mind, nothing is more unknown to him than 
his own future conduct; he knows even less 
what he will do than what he is doing. The 
Abbé de la Mennais no more suspected in 1831 
what he would say and what he would do 
a few years later, than the most violent leaders 
of the French Revolution suspected in 1789 
what they would be and what they would do 
in 1793. The court at Rome was clearer- 
sighted than its fanatical champion; it had been 
under the influence of the charm of the first 
works and of the first successes of the Abbé de 
la Mennais. It had not, however, failed to 
perceive what pernicious and dangerous seed 
might thence germinate. The Avenir occa: 
sioned it profound disquietude; the principles 


and the yearnings of modern society found 


52 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


therein a too ready acceptance; the régime which 
had governed France since 1830 was too much 
the object of its attacks; it demanded too much 
liberty, and made too much noise in doing s0; 
for beneath that noise, and in the shadow of 
that liberty, fermented the anarchical doctrines 
and tendencies which in all cases and places it 
is the aim and the policy of the court of Rome 
to contest. Thus the Avenir and its writers 
placed her in a position full of embarrassment ; 
Rome was anxious neither in any way to ignore 
- the services that they had rendered and that 
they might continue to render her, nor to lose 
sight of the perils that they made her incur ; 
Rome desired to preserve silence respecting 
these writers—neither to avow nor disavow 
them—and to leave it to time to terminate their 
transport and their errors. The Abbé de la 
Mennais did not, however, permit this expectant 
policy; he insisted absolutely that the papacy, 
by pronouncing upon his doctrines and upon 


his attitude, should publicly either give him 


So 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 538 


her support or withdraw it from him, All the 
world knows of the journey which he under- 
took in 1831 to Rome to obtain this result, and 
of his stay there in company with the Abbé 
Lacordaire and M. de Montalembert, “three 
obscure Christians”—to use the words of the 
Abbé de la Mennais—men who thought them- 
selves called, according to the expression of the 
Abbé Lacordaire before the Cour d’Assises at 
Paris, “to reconcile Catholicism with the world.” 
The Pope (Gregory XVI.) judged otherwise, 
and by his encyclical of the 15th August, 1832, 
with regret, but at the same time with as much 
decision as to the substantial matters before 
him as tenderness to the three pilgrims person- 
ally, condemned the Avenir, its doctrines, and 
its tendencies. On the instant, with the con- 
currence of their friends, they declared, all three, 
(10th September, 1832,) that, respectfully sub- 
mittig themselves to the authority of the Vicar 
of Jesus Christ, they abandoned the lists in 
which they had faithfully combated during the 


= 


54 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


past two years ; that, in consequence, the A venir, 
which had been provisionally suspended ever 
since the 15th November previously, would no 
longer appear, and that the General Agency 
for the Defense of Religious Liberty was 
dissolved. 


As the first declaration of the writers of the 
Avenir, after their acquittal by the Cour 


d’Assises at Paris, had been sincere, so was also 
the declaration sincere which was published by 
them immediately after their condemnation by 
the papacy; but they promised more than they 
could perform. When a deep social wound has 
been laid bare, and measures on a large scale 
have been adopted to cure it, it is no longer in 
the power of any individual to keep that wound 
secret, or to stifle the hope of a remedy. How 
many times in the course of this century has 
not the papacy, and have not the ardent 
champions of liberty, condemned and combated 
the efforts made to reconcile Catholicism with 


modern civilization, and to cause the Church to 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 55 


accept the liberties of civil society, and the State 
to recognize the rights of the Church? How 
often has the Church by its censures signalized 
such efforts as impious and suicidal? What 
wit, what eloquence, have not been displayed 
by the Liberals to declare their vanity, their 
worthlessness? ‘To what reproaches, invectives, 
and sarcasms have not their advocates had to 
submit? But no ecclesiastical censure, no wrath 
of religion, no mockery of liberalism has arrest- 
ed the march of this great idea. It has made, 
and it continues every day to force, its way in 
spite of condemnations, attacks, and obstacles of 
every description. Why? For paramount rea- 
sons, Impossible to be lost sight of. For Chris- 
tianity and modern civilization confront each 
other; there exists in the public a profound and 
urepressible feeling of their reciprocal right and 
strength—a profound and irrepressible feeling 
that their disagreement is an immense evil for 
society and for men’s souls; that neither the 


new civil liberties nor the ancient forms of 


a 


56 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


belief and influences of Christianity can ever 
perish; that, necessary, both of them, to nations 
and to individuals, they are both of them des- 
tined to live, and consequently to live together. 
When and in what manner will this feeling 
realize its object, and when will the ancient 
Church and modern civilization have solved the 
problem of their mutual pacification? No one 
can at this moment pronounce; but in all certi- 
tude, the problem will not for that cease to 
weigh upon the world, or the world to strive at 
its solution. Even the men who, in a spirit of 
pious submission or in a paroxysm of sadness 
and discouragement might wish, after having 
attempted it, to renounce the work, could never 
remain inactive before a necessity becoming 
more and more urgent; they doubtless would 
not be long before they returned to the lists 
from which they might have consented to with- 
draw. 

And this is what happened to the three 


eminent men who had made so precipitate a 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 57 


journey to Rome, and had importuned her at an 
inconvenient moment, summoning her at once to 
solve the momentous questions they had raised. 
They returned from Rome with the intention of 
submitting to the decision of the Pope; but 
slumber to such souls was impossible, and it 
was not long before men saw them, the three, 
resuming, although by the most contrary paths, 
all the activity of their minds and of their lives. 
The Abbé de la Mennais threw himself with 
impetuosity into the revolt—a revolt radical 
against the Church and against the State; 
furiously demanding from the populace and 
from revolutions the success which he could not 
obtain in the bosom of order, and in concert 
with the authority previously so ardently de- 
fended by him. Far from following in his new 
and violent course, the Abbé Lacordaire and 
M. de Montalembert separated from him, and 
returned each to his natural and tranquil posi- 
tion; the one to that of a simple priest, almoner 


of the convent of the Visitation, and preacher 


58 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


in the chapel of the College Stanislas; the other 
to that of a young and brilliant political. orator, 
already a favorite in the chamber of Peers, 
although its members did not always think or 
vote with him. Both remained Romanists’ at 
heart; they zealously shared in the great move- 
ment of Christianity, now roused from her 
slumber, but without ceasing to be Liberals in 
their Catholicism, or without arresting their 
efforts to reconcile the Church with the régime 
of liberty. 

The position of each, and the genius of each, 
determined the share that he took in the duties, 
and the place that he selected for the field of 
his action. The Abbé Lacordaire, from the 
pulpit of Notre Dame, developed, or rather let 
me say, painted, in all their splendor, the truths, 
the beauties, the moral and social excellences of 
the Christian Faith and of the Catholic Church. 
M. de Montalembert, in the house of Peers and 
in literature, was the ardent and indefatigable 


champion of the Church, of its maxims, and 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 59 


of its rights. To neither was there any lack of 
success any more than any lack of talent and of 
zeal. A numerous auditory, young and old, 
from the salons and from the schools, believers 
and freethinkers, flocked round the Abbé Lacor- 
daire, all feeling the attraction, and almost all 
the charm; many among them yielding to the 
persuasion of that eloquence so fresh and vivid, 
and abundant, and unlooked for—impetuous 
without rudeness, hardy yet graceful, natural 
even where there was temerity of thought or of 
expression, and repairing or vailing these faults 
by the enchantment of candor and of origin- 
ality. Different, but not inferior, were the 
merits and the successes of M. de Montalembert. 
He was a combatant young too, a fearless Chris- 
tian, both in the political arena and in society ; 
and he carried with him in his polemics to the 
service of the State a sincerity of passion, a rich 
and mobile eloquence, piquant strokes of wit, an 
outpouring of indignant conviction, all of which 


deeply stirred the emotions of his auditors, 


60 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


whether friends or adversaries, and left in 
the mind of calm spectators an impression of 
approving satisfaction, however frequently a 
shock might be given to their feelings of mod- 
eration and of fairness. In the “Conferences” 
of the Abbé Lacordaire it cannot be denied 
that many failings and many omissions are ob- 
servable; although expressed clearly and with 
vivacity, his thought was often superficial ; 
there was in turn a singular mixture of precip- 
itate enthusiasm and of discretion, the former 
displaying itself in his exordiums, the latter at 
the close of his discourses. He announced coura- 
geously his opinions, but accompanied them by 
more reservations than are usually expected 
from one of his Church and party: thus at the 
same time, that throughout all his discourses, 
and in their general character, he showed him- 
self the friend of religious liberty, he hesitated 
sometimes even when the occasion required 
him to proclaim its fundamental principle 


and to rebuke its violations, On his side, 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 61 


M. de Montalembert gave himself up entirely 
to the impression and the combat of the 
moment; in his legitimate ardor for free in- 
struction, the then chosen object of his public 
life, he held obstacles, however real, of no ac- 
count; he ignored the time necessary for its 
final triumph, as well as the real progress, al- 
though partial, which it had obtained, from the 
co-operation or the sufferance of the govern- 
ment of 1830; and in his uncompromising 
defense of the Church, he was more violent 
against the members of the executive govern- 
ment than his own sentiments and his real polt- 
tical views would, in moments of cool reflection, 
have permitted him to be. The Abbé Lacor- 
daire did not sound sufficiently the sources of 
his opinions; M. de Montalembert did not 
properly measure his attacks. But in spite of 
their shortcomings and of our own, of their 
faults and of our own, in all the struggles that 
grew out of religious questions between us, 


they rendered constantly faithful and powerful 


x 
62 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


services to their cause, which, notwithstanding 
our dissentiments on other points, was really 
the cause of Christ’s Faith awaking to new 
birth and life on the bosom of Liberty. 

It is not without well reflecting that I term 
that owr cause. When religious liberty reigns 
in a State, it is a great and a too common error 
to believe that the statesmen charged with its 
government have no religious belief whatever; 
that they are careless in matters of faith because 
they embrace and advocate the cause of liberty 
of conscience. The soul does not abdicate the 
right to its proper and intimate life, because it 
respects in other souls the rights of that same 
life; and nothing is more logical or more legit- 
imate than to sustain with fervor the princi- 
ple of freedom of conscience, and yet to be at 
the same time a true and an earnest Christian. 

I have not here to make a profession of faith 
for others; but I affirm that, from 18380 to 1848, 
the Prince whom I had the honor to serve, and 
the Cebmets to which I had the honor to 


> 
AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 63 


belong, not only always had at heart the main- 
tenance, however difficult, of the principle of re- 
ligious liberty, but that they always felicitated 
themselves upon the progress made by the 
Christian Faith, even when the manner of that 
progress was for them a source of serious em- 
barrassment. In 1841 we were placed, in this 
respect, ina most trying position. Great was 
the general astonishment, and violent were the 
attacks made upon us, when, with a devotedness 
to Catholicism even bolder than had been his 
conferences at Notre Dame, the Abbé Lacordaire 
returned from Rome a monk, and a monk of an 
order which has left more somber memories 
behind it than any other, that of St. Dominic. 
This is not the place to examine what the util- 
ity may be in our days to the Catholic Church 
of the monastic orders, or to inquire whether 
the services they are capable of rendering the 
Church outweigh the objections and the feelings 
of repulsion and uneasiness which they arouse. 


No well-read man can deny their having, in 


64 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


seasons of chaotic confusion, effectually served 
the cause, not only of the Christian Faith, but 
of civilization, of science, and even of liberty. 
The condition of society and of the human 
mind is now very different, and the monastic 
orders cannot take the same position or produce 
the same effects. But whatever we may think 
of the opportuneness of their reconstruction, 
of the right there can be no doubt. Under a 
system sanctioning freedom of conscience and 
free institutions, associations for religious pur- 
poses cannot be worse treated than those for 
purposes of industry, commerce, or literature. 
The State is required to exercise upon com- 
binations of every kind a certain degree of sur- 
veillance; but doubtless the union of souls and 
of lives under one rule and in one costume, 
with a view to eternal interests, is not a juster 
cause for disquietude than a union of purses 
and of labor for the purpose of economizing 
both, with a view to worldly interests. In 
1829, some young Catholic Liberals, MM. de 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 65 


Carné, de Cazalés, de Champagny, de Mont- 
alembert, Foisset de Meaux, Henri Gouraud, 
founded a periodical, Le Correspondant, devoted 
to the reconciliation of Catholicism with the 
free social institutions of the age. The Cor- 
respondant had been suspended in 1835, but 
reappeared in 1843, under the editorship of M. 
Charles Lenormant, one of those friends I have 
lost who retain in my memory the place they 
occupied in my: life. In conducting this work, 
he kept ever in view the principles in which 
it had originated, and among other positions, 
he defended in 1845, with the frank intrepidity 
both of a Catholic and of a Liberal, the rights 
of those religious associations which were at the 
time the object of violent debate* The cabinet 
abstained from all measures of repression, and 
left the new monks freely to their chances of 


success or failure. Twenty-five years have since 


* Des associations religieuses dans le catholicisme; de leur 
esprit, de leur histoire et de leur ayenir; par Charles Lenor- 


mant, de l'Institut. Paris: 1845. 
5 


we 
66 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


elapsed; the Pére Lacordaire mounted once 
more, in his costume as a Dominican, his pulpit 
in Notre-Dame; he resuscitated in France an 
order forgotten, or the object of dread only; 
and to what trouble or embarrassment, I ask, 
to what complaints even, has this resuscitation 
led? To what pretensions of ambition have 
these monks laid claim? what turbulent dis- 
position have they manifested? They have 
paced meekly along our streets; they have 
preached eloquently in our churches; they have 
founded some houses of education; they have 
made use of their rights as freemen, without 
offering in any way to infringe the liberty of 
any other class of citizens. More than all this: 
the sincerity of their sentiments and language 
has been put to the proof; the Pére Lacordaire 
resumed, as a Dominican, at Paris, at Toulouse, 
at Nancy, at Bordeaux, the conferences and the 
preaching that had rendered him popular as a 
simple priest; they became, perhaps, more 


liberal even than they had been originally. 


> 
AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 67 


When the tempest of 1848 had given birth, in 
the imaginations of all men, to every kind of 
dream, and had opened to every ambition every 
career, the Pére Lacordaire was returned by the 
popular suffrage as Deputy to the Constituent 
Assembly. For a moment he thought a new 
era opening for his Church—perhaps for him- 
self. In this arena, upon which the passions of 
party were unchained amid the general dark- 
ness resting upon society, he soon discovered 
that the priest and monk of our day was not in 
his proper place; he withdrew from it to re- 
sume, in his modest retreat at Soréze, his true 
mission as a Christian teacher. He afterward 
issued from it, but for a moment only, to express 
in the French Academy his faith as a Catholic, 
and his confidence in the democratic principles 
of modern times. Such are the peaceable, such 
the only results among us, of the re-establish- 
ment of the order of the Dominicans and of the 
glory of its restorer. 

Its only results? Not so; if the work of the 


68 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


Pére Lacordaire did not exercise any important 
influence upon the laity, it was attended with 
fruitful and salutary effects in the Church of 
Rome itself. Like him, other priests had the 
courage to brave the prejudices of the age re- 
specting the religious orders; like him, others 
refused to suffer themselves to be subjugated. 
by the alarms felt by most members of their 
Church at the names of Science and of Liberty; 
and like him, they scrupled not to devote 
themselves to a common life and a common 
rule, “to work together,” according to their 
own expressions, “to secure the triumph of 
Christian truth, and its triumph by means of 
Philosophy and Science.” Thus was re-estab- 
lished, under the direction of the pious curate 
of Saint-Roch, the Pére Pététot, the congre- 
gation of the Oratoire—that learned and 
modest society that gave to France Malebranche 
and Massillon, and of which Bossuet said, two 
centuries ago: “The immense love for the 


Church of the Cardinal de Bérulle inspired 


- AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 69 


him with the design of forming a company, to 
which he desired to give no other spirit than 
the very spirit of the Church, no other rule 
than its canons, no other superiors than its 
bishops, no other goods than its charity, no 
other solemn vows than those of baptism and 
the priesthood. . . . There, to form true priests, 
they lead them to the fountain of truth; they 
have always in their hands the sacred volume, 
to search there unceasingly its literal sense by 
study, its spirit by prayer, its depth of mean- 
ing by retreat from the world, and its end by 
charity—the termination of everything and the 
treasure of Christianity—Christiani nominis 
thesaurus, as Tertullian terms it.” * Dating 
its restoration from only thirteen years ago, 
the new congregation of the Oratoire is still 
not numerous, and remains little known; it is 
poor, and it desires to remain so; it has need 


of extension and of support, but at the very 


* Bossuet, Oraison funébre du pére Bourgoing, delivered in 
1662, vol. viii, p. 271. 


¥ 


€ 
70 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


outset of its new career it proved itself faithful 
to its origin and worthy of the words of Bos- 
suet. One of its founders, the Pére Gratry, 
took his place at once in the first rank of the 
Christian apologists, moralists, and writers of 
the day: he is a man at once animated and 
gentle, full of his peculiar ideas and sentiments, 
which he carries to an enthusiastic height, but 
without pride and without jealousy, and ar- 
dently propagating them by his books, his 
lectures, and his conversation. These are all 
distinguished by eloquent appeals to human 
sympathies, touching even where they do not 
convince, and leaving the mind always in 
emotion at the prospects which they open. 
Another member of the new Oratoire, the Pére 
Valvoger, has given a succinct account, in a 
learned work, (“Introduction historique et cri- 
tique aux livres du Nouveau Testament,”) of 
the Researches and Evidences of Christianity, 
by the principal foreign theologians. Under 


the strong influence of the opinions of its first 


“AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 71 


founders, and at the same time comprehending 
the mind and the requirements of France at the 
present day, the rising congregation of the 
Oratoire does not evade examination or discus- 
sion; it respects science, and in the religious 
truths which it teaches, and its relations with 
the souls that it summons to believe, it does 
not shrink from accepting fearlessly the terms 
and the forms of liberty. 

In the midst of this great movement of men’s 
minds in matters of religion, what has been 
done since the opening of this century by the 
chiefs of the Catholic Church of France, by their 
bishops and by the clergy, called, by their 
alliance with the State and by their own rights, 
to assume the education and the Christian 
direction of the human soul? 

They were at first and especially occupied 
with the real resuscitation of that Christian 
religion, now returning to French society, to its 
rank there and to its mission, but returning as 


exiles return—ill provided, disorganized, and to 


72 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


a home that seems no home. To render back 
to France, now Catholic, churches for its wor- 
ship, priests for its churches, seminaries to form 
its priests, pupils to people those seminaries; to 
assure also to the edifice thus rising from its 
ruins the time for its proper establishment and 
consolidation—such, under the first empire, was 
the dominant thought, almost the exclusive 
thought, of the Episcopacy, of the clergy in- 
stituted by the Concordat. A work great and 
difficult, for which neither materials nor work- 
men were at hand, and which required for its 
accomplishment strong support and a long 
period of repose. The clergy of this epoch 
have been justly reproached with their uniform 
obsequiousness to the Emperor Napoleon. No 
doubt it was a shameful spectacle, in 1811, 
which those docile bishops afforded, when they 
assembled in council and were never weary of 
lavishing caresses upon the despot who had 
not only stripped the chief of their Church, . 


Pius VIL, of his dominions, but was then 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 73 


detaining him a prisoner at Savona, denying 
his natural counselors, the cardinals, all access 
to him, refusing him even a secretary to write 
his letters, and charging an officer of the gen- 
darmerie to watch by day and by night all his 
movements. Only a single fact explains and 
somewhat excuses the pusillanimity of the 
clergy when confronted with this tyranny: 
these bishops had seen Christianity proscribed, 
its churches closed, profaned, demolished, its 
priests hunted and massacred, their flocks left 
without any worship, any guide, any conso- 
lation. The chance of the recurrence of such 
events filled them with horror. Who could 
affirm that there was no such chance, and that 
the reality of the eve was not the possibility of 
the morrow? With such causes of apprehension 
a good priest might feel his conscience pro- 
foundly troubled; and a timid priest might 
regard his weakness as justified. What sacri- 
fices were not permissible, nay, even imperative, 


to prevent such disasters ? 


74 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


Still, the violent measures of Napoleon did 
not fail to encounter, sometimes rebukes, and 
occasionally resistance, on the part of the clergy; 
it was not only that some prelates* in the 
council, with more courage than moderation, 
censured his conduct toward the Pope: the 
council itself—forgetting at last, in its anxiety 
to vindicate the honor of the whole body, its 
long habit of obsequiousness—voted an address 
to the Emperor, an act of independence which 
occasioned its abrupt dissolution. And of the 
two ecclesiastics to whose counsels, from just 
motives of esteem, Napoleon showed least dis- 
inclination to give ear, one—the Abbé Emery, 
“Superior General” of the Congregation of St. 
Sulpice—had just previously, not long before 
he died, openly, yet with dignity, resisted the 
Emperor;+ the other, M. Duvoisin, Bishop of 


* Among others M. d’Avian, Archbishop of Bordeaux, M. 
de Boulogne, Bishop of Troyes, and M. de Broglie, Bishop of 
Gaud. 

t Vie de M. Emery, supérieur général du séminaire et de la 
compagnie de Saint-Sulpice, t. ii, pp. 286-346. Paris: 1862. 


AWAKENING OF OHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 75 


Nantes, dictated upon his deathbed these 
powerful and affectionate lines: “I supplicate 
the Emperor to restore the holy Father to lib- 
erty. His captivity troubles the extreme mo- 


ments of my life. On several occasions I had “« 


.the honor to inform the Emperor of the afflic- 
tion which this captivity is causing to the whole 
of Christendom, and of the inconveniences 
which would attend its prolongation. The 
happiness of his Majesty himself, I believe, 
depends upon the return of his Holiness to 
Rome.” Idly does Despotism excuse its arbi- 
trary acts, as if they resulted from the want of 
foresight or the servility of its flatterers; for 
the blindest have their gleams of light, and 
even the most timid their intrepid moments, 
during which they speak the truth, although 
they speak it in vain. 

Under the Restoration, it was no longer fear, 
but hope—hope ill-founded, too—which misled 
the French clergy, betrayed them into the com- 


mission of many faults, and checked the prog- 


76 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


ress of roused Christendom. In the then re- 
action against the Revolution, ecclesiastical am- 
bition had its part; partisans of the Crown and 
of Rome—ardent ones—some through sincere 
devotion, others from political calculation, be- 
heved it to be necessary and possible to restore. 
to the Catholic clergy a part at least of the 
social position and of the direct authority which 
they had possessed before 1789. This was 
evincing a strange ignorance of the fundamental 
character of French society, such as it has been 
made by its history and by its great modern 
Revolution. French society is essentially and 
insuperably “laic;” the separation of temporals 
from spirituals, and the empire of the laity in 
public affairs, are consummated and dominant 
facts, not to be attacked, or even menaced, with- 
out oceasioning throughout the whole frame- 
work of society an uritation and a disquietude, 
perilous alike for Church and for State. Noth- 
ing in France at the present moment is more 


fatal to the influence of religion than the chance, 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 77% 


or the appearance even, of ecclesiastical domi- 
nation. ‘This chance and this appearance were, 
under the Restoration, the plague of the Catho- 
lic religion and of the French clergy—a plague 
the grave consequences of which are the more 
to be deplored as it was neither very deep- 
seated nor very formidable. It is a fact too 
little remarked, that the clergy were not then 
the principal authors of the faults which sub- 
sequently both they and religion had such 
cause to rue. No doubt many inadmissible 
claims, many unreasonable and offensive re- 
quirements, many rash expectations, proceeded 
from the ranks of the clergy; but there was in 
all this more a suggestion of their past history, 
or an unmeaning vanity, than a real and ardent 
ambition ; even the clergy felt instinctively that 
| political power was not now suited to them, 
and that France would no longer accept at 
their hands as ministers even a Cardinal Riche- 
lieu or a Cardinal Mazarin. At first the contra- 


revolutionary and non-ecclesiastical party in the 


* 


48 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


Chamber of 1815, and, afterward, the blind 
fanatical coterie of the Court of Charles the 
Tenth, hurried the clergy into their own vortex, 
and compromised the cause of religion by 
making its ministers instruments of their in- 
fluence and auxiliaries in their combats. The 
ecclesiastics had not the courage to resist; in 
spite of their distaste for the new spirit which 
was abroad, most of the bishops and of the 
priesthood, warned by their experience in the 
Revolution, would have preferred to remain out 
of the sphere of politics, and to confine them- 
selves to the functions of their religious mis- 
sion, rather than to be constantly struggling 
against popular opinions; so, when any oppor- 
tunity presented itself to show their sympathy, 
they hastened to embrace it. When, in 1824, 
the bill of M. de Villéle for the conversion of 
the “Rentes” created a great stir among the 
“ Bourgeoisie” of Paris, it was the Archbishop 
of Paris, M. de Quélen, who constituted himself 
in the Chamber of Peers the principal organ of 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. "9 


the Opposition; and when, in 1828, the move- 
ment of public opinion and of the magistracy 
against the religious congregations wrested. from 
the King (Charles the Tenth) the Ordonnances 
of the 21st June, the Bishop of Beauvais, 
M. Feutries, at that time the Minister of Eccle- 
siastical Affairs, did not hesitate to countersign 
them. The members of the priesthood live in 
close contact with the people, and cannot long 
remain in ignorance of the real state of their 
opinions, or long persist in holding them 
lightly. The French clergy, as a whole, were 
more resigned to the new state of society than 
King Charles the Tenth and his intimate 
friends; the false ideas and the unreasonable 
political pretensions of the monarch and of 
the coterie which formed his court, far more 
than the religious bigotry of the Church, occa- 
sioned the great faults committed under the 
Restoration. 

At all epochs and in all parties some man is 


always met with in whom are centered and per- 


80 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


sonified whatever good sense, sound views, and 
wise purposes there are in the party to which 
he belongs. Such a man under the Restoration 
and for the lay Legitimists was M. de Villéle. 
True to his friends, he nevertheless knew, or I 
should rather say he promptly learned in public 
life to understand, what France then actually 
was, and what qualities, to be successful, her 
government should possess. If he had had 
toward his party and his king as much in- 
dependence and firmness in action as he had 
correct appreciation in thought, he might per- 
haps have obtained a more complete and more 
lasting success. The clergy on their side also 
had at this epoch a faithful representative of 
whatever religious or political sagacity existed 
in the French Church: it is here to the Abbé 
Frayssinous, Bishop of Hermopolis, that the 
honor and the merit belong. His task was 
far easier than that of M. de Villéle, for he was 
never put to any trial: he had no struggle to 


sustain ; he remained naturally, or kept himself 


aod 


. a 
AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 81 


voluntarily, out of the arena of events and of 
parties; but it was in this precisely that he 
showed his good sense, and his correct apprecia- 
- tion of the permanent interests and the real 
dispositions of the clergy of his time. Neither 
as theologian, nor as orator, nor as statesman 
was the Abbé Frayssinous a man of eminence, or 
remarkable for power of intellect; but in the 
different phases of his career, in his personal 
conduct, and in his writings, he had an unerr- 
ing instinct of what was just and possible, and 
showed no common tact in retiring with dig- 
nity from untenable positions, and escaping from 
questions that he could not settle. Upon these _ 
occasions he would confine himself to his mis 
sion of a priest and moralist of the Christian 
religion. From 1803 to 1822 he held, suspend- 
ed, and resumed in the Church of St. Sulpice, 
his “conferences upon religious subjects;” re- 
markable not only by a judicious defense of the 
great truths of Christianity, but by a continuous, 


although somewhat timorous, effort to place the 
6 


Le 


i 


82 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


doctrines of the Church in harmony with the 
principles of natural justice and of civil liberty. 
He was not, like the Pére Lacordaire or M. de 
Montalembert, a Catholic Liberal; he was a 
priest—moderate and equitable, not from luke- 
warmness in his faith, but from respect to legal 
rights and human sentiments. Although his 
“conferences” had not the success and popula- 
rity that distinguished later, in Nétre-Dame, 
those of the Pére Lacordaire, they attracted a 
numerous auditory, and exercised material in- 
fluence in giving to the awakening of Chris- 
tianity a wider range and a firmer basis.* In 
his work upon the true principles of the Gal- 
lican Church, the Abbé Frayssinous manifested 
the same moderate and conciliatory spirit—not 

* The “conferences” of the Abbé Frayssinous at St. Sulpice 
have been published under this title: Défense du Chris- 
tianisme, ou conférences sur la religion. 3 vols. 8vo. Paris: 
1825. The Abbé Frayssinous published also in 1818 a work 
with the following title: Les vrais principes de l’église gal- 
licane sur la puissance ecclesiastique, la Papauté, les Libertés 


gallicanes, la Promotion des éyéques, les trois Concordats, et 
les Appels comme d’abus, 


vs 


eS 
AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 83 


always tracing principles to their sources, but 
never pushing facts or ideas to their extreme 
consequences; while remaining the faithful 
servant of the Church he showed himself also 
rather the friend of Christian peace than the 
jealous advocate of ecclesiastical power. His 
mode of life was as modest as his opinions; he 
never made power his aim, neither did he ever 
seek for honors, whether political, ecclesiastical, 
or academic; he declined them even when with- 
in his reach. He joined the Cabinet in 1824, 
as Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs and of Pub- 
lic Instruction; he withdrew from it in 1828, 
when the mounting wave of Liberalism de- 
manded that a more vigorous policy should be 
adopted against the religious congregations 
than the pupil and orator of St. Sulpice was 
willing to sanction. He neither had the quali- 
ties necessary for governing the French clergy, 
nor did he pretend to govern them; but he 
represented them, nevertheless, in all their more 


irreproachable and prudent opinions. Unfor- 


She 


84 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


tunately, mere common sense and prudence do 
not suffice more in the Church than in the 
State to save nations from the consequences of 
their faults of omission and commission; for 
this object, higher qualities are necessary as 
well as more rude efforts. 

It was one of the first effects of the Revo- 
lution in 1830, to make visible to all the injury 
that the faults of their friends, rather than the 
blows of their adversaries, had inflicted, under 
the Restoration, upon the clergy, and through 
the clergy upon religion. The acts of violence 
which, during the revolutionary crisis from 1830 
to 1832, were directed at the Churches—the 
crosses thrown down, the insulting cries, and 
antichristian manifestations; a little later, the 
riot before the church of St. Germain |’Auxer- 
rois, on the occasion of the service celebrated on 
the anniversary of the death of the Duke de 
Berri—the archiepiscopal palace ruined and 
pillaged—the church broken into and closed— 


the menaces directed at the priests—what were 


« 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 85 


all these deplorable acts but the explosion of a 
popular reaction, provoked by the share a part 
of the clergy had taken in favor of a retro- 
grade policy—of a return to the ancient régime 
and to absolutism? Violent men profited by 
this reaction to satisfy their impiety and licen- 
tiousness, but they could never have excited the 
movement or made it successful had they 
hoisted their own banner; there must be some 
little truth before a populace will suffer itself to 
be so misled; and the crowd who in February, 
1831, so furiously rose in insurrection before 
St. Germain l’Auxerrois, would have paused in 
astonishment had it perceived that what it was 
so brutally attacking and destroying was—not 
the ancient régime, not absolutism—but reli- 
gion and liberty. 

To put an end to this confusion, full at once 
of deception and of peril, but a single thing 
was required: to banish from the Church, and 
from its relations with the State, worldly am- 


bition and influences, and to replace them by 


86 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


influences of a moral description; instead of a 
political banner, they should have only hoisted 
the banner of religious faith and liberty of con- 
science. That was the great work, or, to use a 
better expression, the great progress, which 
from 1830 to 1848 was aimed at and accom- 
plished. 

The efforts made and the debates instituted 
at this epoch by the most eminent champions 
of the Church are remarkable, because they no 
longer proposed to restore any fragment of its 
ancient power, but to insure to it its place and 
its share in the new public institutions of 
liberty. The little militant party of Catholic 
Liberals quitted the arena of the ancient polit- 
ical régime, and took up their position on that 
of the new constitution, claiming for the Church, 
for its ministers, and for its faithful subjects, 
the exercise of all the rights and the free devel- 
opment of all the power that, under the consti- 
tution, either belonged, or ought to belong, to 


all citizens. They made no reservation of 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


opinion, no effort more or less covert, in further- 
ance of any pretensions of bygone times, 
whether dynastic, aristrocratic, or theocratic; 
the frank acceptance of the present age and 
actual society, provided that Christian faith, 
Christian morals, and Christian institutions, 
might have free room to work; such was, in the 
midst of all the factions and political plottings 
of this period, the constant attitude of the 
Catholic Liberal party, that is, of M. de Montal- 
embert, the Pére Lacordaire, M. Charles Lenor- 
mant, Frederic Ozanam, and of the friends in 
small number grouped around them. 

Whoever feels astonished that their number 
was so small, shows little acquaintance with our 
country or our times. The enterprise which they 
undertook was singularly bold and difficult; to 
drag France out of its rut of incredulity and 
irreligion, and at the same time to extricate 
Catholicism from its rut of impolicy, its alliance 
with absolutism, its timorous immobility in the 


presence of liberty; to proclaim and simulta. 


87" 


'¥ 


- 


4 


a a 
88 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


neously to defend, in spirituals, the Christian 
faith, and, in temporals, the régime of liberty. 
Certainly in France, and in the 19th century, 
the devotion of men to such a task supposes an 
enthusiasm and an energy of conviction of which 
few are capable; and if the new Christian 
Liberals flattered themselves that success would 
be easy, events must soon have disabused them. 
Attacked with ardor by the opponents of all 
religion, they were also assailed by Catholics 
devoted to the ancient régime of the Church, 
and alarmed at the new system pressed upon 
their acceptance. The former of these two 
attacks caused the Catholic Liberals neither 
surprise nor embarrassment; but the latter 
brought with it bitter annoyance and disappoint- 
ment, for they found directly opposed to them 
members of their own faith. Soon they were 
to have as their adversary a man who, by his 
vigorous talents—employed with equal violence 
against the incredulous of all shades of opinions, 


and against the Catholic Liberals too—exercised 


= 


¥ 
AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 89 


an influence upon a great number of Catholics, 
whether of the laity or priesthood, and indis- 
posed them to any reconciliation with that 
modern society which he irritated still more 
against them. I knew M. Veuillot at the com- 
mencement of his literary career, when he ac- 
companied General Bugeaud to the seat of his 
government in Algeria. At this epoch he ad- 
dressed to me two memorials upon the subject 
of the moral condition of the colony and of the 
army. They struck me by their decided tone, 
and the straightforwardness and candor with 
which he expressed sentiments already distin- 
guished by devotion. Already he regarded the 
religion of his own Church, and of ¢ alone, as 
the sure basis of human morality and social 
order; but he had not yet proclaimed as his 
doctrine the deplorable error that Faith enjoins 
war upon Liberty. He merited a better under- 
standing of the cause of Christianity ; he merited 
to be a better advocate of the Church at Rome 


than an advocate who, although one of its most 


ms 
. 
90 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 
devoted defenders, has yet tices injured the 
cause that he sought to serve. ; 

These political revolutions and these domes- 
tic dissensions left, in the period that ensued 
after 1830, the Catholic Church in a difficult 
situation, but in one salutary for it and fruitful 
of consequences. The clergy no longer counted 
on the favor of Government, but they had at 
the same time to fear from it neither violence 
nor hostility. Left to themselves, they felt the 
necessity of independent existence, and saw that 
they must replace credit with the authorities by 
influence with the country; and this influence 
they were likely to obtain. If they did not 
possess all the privileges which they coveted, 
they had enough to enable them every day to 
conquer additional powers, supposing them 
willing and sagacious enough to take the 
trouble and employ the right means. In my 
opinion, they did not do at this epoch, in the 
interest of religion and of the Church, all that 


their position permitted, or all that their mis- 


* 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 91 


sion required at their hands; but temporal or 
spiritual governors, layman or priests, who ever 
did, I do not say what he ought, but what he 
could have done? The greater part of the 
bishops and of the priests were vacillating and 
timorous; the problem before them went be- 
yond their opinions, and the events beyond their 
strength; the impetuous Liberalism of M. de 
Montalembert and of his friends» disquieted 
them; they saw in him rather a valiant champion 
than a representative they could rely upon. 
Among those who joined with him in the 
struggle for the freedom of instruction, there - 
were some who showed, with reference to the 
Government of 1830 and the University, little 
fairness or prudence: these injured the cause 
rather than served it. Whether from submis- 
sion to orders from Rome, or from their natural 
impulse, the clergy, taken as a whole, showed 
little taste for liberty ; even while they demand- 
ed it, they were rather inclined to immobility 
than progress. But whatever the fears and 


e 


92 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


hesitations of individuals, when | the general 
current of ideas and of popular opinions once 
penetrates to the classes least disposed to enter- 
tain them, it never fails, whether they avow it, 
or whether they even know it, to swell and to 
advance. Around and among the clergy them- 
selves the spirit of progress and of liberty 
gained ground, although by insensible degrees. 
Here and there individual priests, like the Abbé 
Bautain, formerly a student with M. Jouftroy at 
the Ecole Normale, and Professor of Philosophy 
in the Faculty of Letters at Strasbourg, propa- 
gated im the Church the liberal movement, 
forming for it in different places new centers of 
action. The spirit which had awakened Chris- 
tianity manifested itself, too, in our great lay 
establishments for the higher course of instruc 
tion; not always without check, but still with a 
success the more conspicuous the more it was con- 
tested. In 1846, some disturbances, occasioned 
by a thoughtless and puerile intolerance, made 


by M. Lenormant, at that time my substitute 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 93 


(suppléant) in the chair of Modern History at 
the Faculty of Letters, determine to withdraw 
from the Sorbonne, where he had made a cour- 
ageous avowal of his faith ; but M. Ozanam, the 
worthy successor to the chair of M. Fauriel, 
maintained in the same place the same principles 
with a more successful perseverance, and with 
such a depth of conviction and such a warmth 
of emotion that sometimes he carried the feel- 
ings of his auditors away with him, and some- 
times commanded respectful attention even from 
those most confirmed in their incredulity. And 
while the spirit of Christianity was thus mani- 
festing itself in the free Faculty of Letters, the 
teaching of the Faculty of Theology attested, 
under that same roof, a notable progress in 
knowledge and in Liberalism. The Abbé 
Maret, in his lectures on the Dogmas of Religion, 
the Abbé Frére, in his discourses on the Scrip- 
tures; the Abbé Dupanloup and the Abbé 
Gerbet, in their lectures on Sacred Eloquence, 


displayed not only a firm and active faith, but 


94 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


views upon philosophy, history, and literature, 
necessarily implying an aquaintance with the 
works of human science, and an appreciation of 
the nights of liberty. _Ecclesiastics and laymen, 
not members of the scientific establishments of 
the State, published, under the name of the 
“Université Catholique,” a series of courses in 
which philosophy, history, natural sciences, 
archeology, and the arts were explained and 
taught in harmony with the dogmas and sen- 
timents of religious men. And even far from 
Paris, in several great episcopal seminaries, clas- 
sical-and theological studies took a wider range, 
and attained a scientific value that they had 
not for a long time possessed. 

“Faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being 
alone,” says the Apostle St. James. Christianity 
has borne abundant fruits since its awakening 
at the commencement of this century. I have 
before me the “Manual des Gluvres et institu- 
tions de charité de Paris,” published in 1862, 
by order of the archbishop, M. Sibour. In- 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 95 


dependently of the establishments under the 
direction of Government, I find in it 107 char- 
itable institutions or associations, of every 
kind, originated and supported by zealous 
Christians in the interval between 1820 and 
1848. Of these I will only cite some of the 
principal ones, to establish their character and 
their progress. In the year 1822 the idea struck 
two poor servants at Lyons to make the rounds 
of their parish and collect weekly one sou from 
each person, in aid of the conversion of infidels, 
This was the origin of the association called 
“V’Ciuvre de la propagation de la Foi,” now 
under the direction of two councils, composed 
of members of the clergy and of the laity, 
having their sittings, one at Lyons, the other at 
Paris. The report published by this association 
in June, 1824, showed for the two years, 1823 
and 1824, a receipt of 80,000 fr, (82002) 
This association received in 1864 the sum of | 
5,090,041 fr. 48 cent. (203,6012 13s. 3d.) 


in which amount France alone figures . for 


96 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


8,479,290 fr. 65 cent., (139,1710. 12s. 63d.,) and 
it divided 4,658,672 fr. 56 cent. (186,346/. 18s. 
6id.) among five hundred dioceses, and appro- 
priated those funds to the support of the Catho- 
lic missionaries in the five parts of the world. 
It counted from the year 1852, 1,500,000 sub- 
scribers, and it distributed 170,000 copies of 


its “Annals,” (Annales de propagation de la | 


Foi,) which form a sequel to the “Lettres edi- 
ficantes,” and keep the Christian world informed 
of their doings. In May, 1833, eight young 
men, at the suggestion of Frederic Ozanam, 
“wishing,” said the Peré Lacordaire, “to give 
one more proof of what Christianity can effect 
in behalf of the poor, began to ascend to those 
upper stories which were the hidden haunts of 
the misery of their quarter. Men saw youths 
in the flower of their age and fresh from school 
regularly visiting, without any feeling of repul- 
sion, the most abject habitations, and conveying 
to their unknown and suffering tenants a pass- 


ing vision of charity.” Twenty years later, in 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 97 


1853, Ozanam said at Florence, when on his 
death-bed: “Instead of eight only, at Paris 
alone we are two thousand strong, and we visit 
five thousand families, that is to say, about 
twenty thousand individuals, or a quarter of 
the poor contained in that great city. The 
conferences in France alone number five hund- 
red, and we have them too in England, in 
Spain, Belgium, America, and even in Jeru- 
salem.” Nine years afterward, in 1862, when 
the Government, listening to mistaken counsels, 
suppressed the General Council of the Con- 
ferences of St. Vincent de Paul, and by doing 
so destroyed the central bond that kept the 
society together, the latter counted more than 
8000 local conferences; it consisted of about 
30,000 members, who visited in their homes more 
than 100,000 indigent families, and had already 
introduced into the greater part of the principal 
cities a system which exercised a control over 
the interests of apprentices and of prisoners. 


During the course of the same epoch the Sisters 
7 


98 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


of Charity, whose number, a century aiter their 
foundation by St. Vincent de Paul, had not ex- 
ceeded 1500, already reached 18,000, of whom 
16,000 were Frenchwomen ; and at this moment 
they are plying throughout the world their 
works of piety and charity. Another society, 
“Les petites sceurs des pauvres,” was founded 
in 1845, in imitation of Jeanne Jugan, a poor 
servant, a native of Brittany, who had been 
just crowned by the French Academy. This 
society receives and succors in their establish- 
ment nearly 20,000 aged men. Another associ- 
ation, “Les Fréres de la doctrine Chrétienne,” 
which had in the year 1844, 468 schools, main- 
tains this year (1865) 920, and the number of 
the pupils has increased from 198,188 to 335,382. 
- State and ecclesiastical documents attest, that 
by concurring causes of encouragement on the 
part of the State, of local subventions and of 
private donations, ten thousand churches have 
been, during the last fifty years, built, rebuilt, 
or suitably adapted for the performance of the 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANOE, 99 


services of the Church of Rome. I might cite 
many similar facts. In all the directions and 
under all the forms in which piety and charity 
manifest themselves, faith and liberty, ‘and 
faith and science have, since the awakening 
of Christianity and since the cause of religion 
has been separated from politics, drawn nearer 
to one another, and faith and its manifestation 
by charity have made a simultaneous advance 
and a like progress. 
Had the Government of 1830 remained 
standing; had State and Church each retained 
reciprocally the same situation and the same 
attitude, the facts to which I have just alluded 
might have long remained unobserved. Society 
does not, any more than individuals, render an 
account to itself of the intimate relations of its 
existence, or of the transformations to which 
these give rise; but Providence has its moments 
when it suddenly lightens up the stage of the 
world and reveals to all actors and spectators 


the import and the effect of what is passing 


100 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


around them. The Revolution of 1848 threw 
upon the progress of the Catholic Church and 
its relations with French society since 1830 the 
clear light of such a revelation. 

In this sudden subversion of all things, in the 
presence of a republic extemporized upon the 
ruins of three monarchies—the monarchy of 
glory, the monarchy of tradition, and the mon- 
archy of public opinion—in the midst of this 
nation, suddenly insurgent and beyond either 
its aim or expectation sovereign, what became of 
the Church? What did its ministers? If some 
of them participated in the current dreams, cer- 
tainly the majority were full of anguish and 
alarm; they did not combat the new institu- 
tions; they did not pretend to exercise any in- 
fluence for or against any party; they sought 
only to purify the Republic by securing in it a 
place for Religion; they did not stand aloof 
from the people; they showed themselves, in 
its great assemblages and in its fétes, planting 
the cross of Jesus by the side of the tree of 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 101 


liberty. Never did the Church stand so aloof 
from politics ; never was she more modest in her 
attitude; never less exacting—I will not say 
more obsequious, as far as the Government or 
the public was concerned; never more absorbed 
with her mission of piety and morality, what- 
ever the Government of France might be, and 
whoever her masters. 

And what in their turn was the conduct of 
the people toward the Church? I do not mean 
to say that they confided in her, or showed her 
much affection. The popular movement in 
1848 was no doubt far from being religious; 
and the ideas, acts, and language which pro- 
ceeded from it every instant, were well cal- 
culated to disturb and sadden the hearts of 
Christians; but religion and its ministers were 
in no respect ill treated, insulted, or persecuted ; 
their forms of worship were not interrupted: 
when they showed themselves out of doors, 
they were received with respect; and at the 


sight of a virtuous archbishop mortally wounded 


102 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


in the streets, in the very endeavor to appease 
the civil war by the exhibition of the cross, a 
painful stupor seized the people; a pang of re- 
morse and of shame traversed those masses of 
disbelievers at the sight of a martyr. It was 
clear that in the interval between 1830 and 
1848, although the Christian Church had not 
aroused in the people either faith or sympathy, 
that Church had at least won liberty and peace. 

When the revolutionary fever had subsided, 
when the Republic had given itself a chief, and 
was waiting for a master, it was no longer in 
the street, by popular impressions, but in the 
Assemblies, and by the constituted authorities, 
that the great questions of the day were put 
and were solved. There, too, the progress, 
which the Catholic Church had made, became 
immediately evident, and its gains were ascer- 
tained. It counted at this moment among 
its most zealous servants a man new to public 
affairs, who had entered political life as an ad- 


herent of the Legitimist Opposition to the 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 103 


Monarchy of 1830, a man who accepted the 
Republic, and had acquired in a few days a just 
renown by his courageous resistance to anarchy. 
By a choice, fortunate but at the same time un- 
foreseen, M. de Falloux became the Minister of 
Public Instruction and of Worship in the first 
cabinet formed by the Prince President of the 
Republic. The new minister immediately de- 
voted himself to the important measure that the 
Catholic Church had had in view ever since the 
year 1830, that is, to the complete establish. 
ment, under the sanction of the law, of the prin- 
ciple of liberty of instruction. He proceeded in 
his task at once with intelligence and boldness. 
To prepare his project of law, he appointed a 
numerous commission, and summoned to it the 
most eminent men, who represented views and 
interests the most diverse; laymen and ecclesi- 
astics, Romanists, Protestants and philosophers, 
Republicans, Legitimists, Orleanists and Bona- 
partists, M. Thiers and the Abbé Dupanloup, 
M. Cousin and M. de Montalembert, M. Saint 


104 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


Mare Girardin and M. Cochin, M. Cuvier and 
the Abbé Sibour.* 

M. Thiers was the president of this commis- 
sion, which sat during five months. It discussed 
every question respecting the organization of 
public instruction with a passionate ardor, and, 
at the same time, with an earnest and sincere 
desire to conciliate, by their resolutions, all 
opinions. According to the character of the 
times and the state of public sentiment, critical 
and perilous situations precipitate men some- 
times to the commission of insane acts of 
violence, and sometimes keep them within the 
line of fairness and prudence. The project 
of law which issued from the commission of 
M. de Falloux had the merit of prudence. In 

* The following is a complete list of the members of the 
Commission, as given in the “Moniteur” of the 22d June, 
1849: M. Thiers, president; MM. Cousin, St. Marc Girardin, 
Dubois, the Abbé Dupanloup, Peupin, Janvier, Laurentie, Fres- 
lon, Ballaguet, de Montalembert, Fresneau, Poulain de Bossay, 
Cuvier, Michel, Armand de Melun, Henri de Riancey, Cochin, 


the Abbé Sibour, Roux-Lavergne, de Montreuil-Housset, and 
Alexis Chevalier, secretary. 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 105 


making mutual. concessions, the representa- 
tives of the different systems took good care to 
protest that they did not renounce their peculiar 
principles—a language which made sometimes 
their resolutions have the air of a superficial 
and incoherent compromise; but men could, 
nevertheless, observe how conspicuous that 
project was for its large and practical character, 
and its respect for different rights; and they 
could also see how the State, the Church, and 
private establishments were left free to compete 
in matters of public instruction. When this 
project was discussed in the Legislative As- 
sembly, M. de Falloux was no longer minister; 
but the impulse had been given, and his measure 
was out of danger; his successor, M. de Parien, 
too, gave it the support which it deserved; and 
after a discussion which occupied thirty-seven 
sittings, the Assembly, by a strong majority, 
passed the law, without introducing any im- 
portant modification. The Liberty of Instruc. 


tion was founded. 


106 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


Fifteen years have passed, and it subsists. 
The State, the Church, private institutions 
founded by laymen or by ecclesiastics, have 
competed actively during all that period. Re- 
ligious congregations, Lazarists, Dominicans, 
Oratorians, Jesuits, have in this struggle dis- 
played all the enthusiasm of faith, all the ardor 
of reciprocal rivalry. The Jesuits, since the 
year 1850, have opened twenty colleges for 
secondary instruction, and have founded at 
Paris, for courses of study preparatory to the 
special schools, an establishment whose successes 
have attracted the attention of the government 
and of the public; for it sends every year to | 
the Military Schools, the Polytechnic, Naval, or 
Central, an extraordinary number of successful 
candidates, who have passed with honor, al- 
though the competition has been extensive and 
the examinations are severe. A great school, 
founded by the Archbishop of Paris for the 
higher branches of ecclesiastical study in the 


ancient house of the Carmelites, has formed 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 107 


priests who, in the public examinations and 
theses, have proved themselves capable of 
taking rank by the side of the best pupils of 
the lay establishment of the “Ecole Normale 
Supérieure.” Everywhere the University has 
encountered numerous and ardent rivals; and it 
has been at the same time in its own interior a 
prey-to painful trials. Under the pretext of an 
interest for studies of a scientific and practical 
nature, classical and philosophical studies have 
been displaced and depreciated. At the very 
moment that the University was losing its 
privileges beyond, it saw its principles and its 
organization shaken inside its walls, 

Faithful to her convictions and traditions, 
even while accepting the experiments and the 
struggles that were forced upon her, the Uni- 
versity has surmounted perils from within and 
rivalries from without; on the one side, little 
by little, it has returned to its system of a large 
and solid teaching of the classics; on the other, 


the level of the studies in its principal establish- 


108 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


ments has been raised, and the number of its 
pupils has been ever on the increase. The 
Lycées counted (in 1850) 19,300; they have 
now (1865) more than 30,000 pupils. The 
State has thrown open the career of instruction 
to the Church, and has at the same time re- 
doubled its own solicitude and success. Liberty 
of instruction has calmed both the anxieties 

of the religious party that made them demand 
: it, and those anxieties of the laity which that 
liberty had inspired. It has given peace to the 
State and to the Church, at the same time that 
it has excited their emulation and stimulated 
their progress. 
i NE incident which made some noise at the 
time has, under the new régime, shown the 
force of the Liberal spirit, and proved that, 
when needed, it would have unforeseen defend- 
ers, Under the influence of a blind zeal, a 
pious ecclesiastic, the Abbé Gaume, demanded 
by what right the literature of pagan antiquity 
occupied the place it did in public teaching; 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 109 


denounced it as “the devouring canker of 
modern societies;” and insisted that the Chris- 
tian classics should replace in our schools the 
Greek and Latin classics. What was this but 
to reject one of the great cradles of modern 
civilization; to condemn the renaissance of lit- 
erature in the fifteenth century, as well as the 
religious reform in the sixteenth century; and 
to close to the minds of rising generations of 
Christians the general history of the world! 
‘This attack upon the system of public instruc- 
tion which had been in vigor during the last 
four centuries in all the States of Christendom, 
met from a part of the Romanists with a sym- 
pathetic reception: bishops, eminent for learning, 
thanked its author; M. Veuillot constituted 
himself his champion. But in the Catholic 
Church itself, as well as in the University, the 
fire of the defense silenced that of the attack; 
— ecclesiastics, as eminent by their piety as by 
| their science, the Bishop of Orleans at their 


head, proclaimed aloud their sympathy for the 


j 


} 


» 
110 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


comprehensive scheme and the liberal stucies 


- which embrace all the fair works of man’s intel- 


ligence. The Jesuits on this occasion set an 
example of broad views and common sense; 
they introduced no modification into the pro- — 
grammes of their colleges; the Péres Cahoux 
and Daniel demonstrated their propriety, nay, 
their necessity ; and the literature of the Greeks 


and of the Romans has preserved in the educa- 


‘tion of Christians the place which it gained in 


- their history by the right of genius and by the 


splendor of its productions. 

Scarcely had this controversy on a literary 
and moral subject been settled, when questions 
of far more gravity were raised, and more pro- 
foundly agitated Christian society. Christians 
found themselves attacked simultaneously 
upon scientific and upon political grounds. 
Men denied to the Christian Faith its reason- 
ableness and its vital sources—to the Church 
of Rome its traditional and historical régime, 


and the temporal power of its chief. 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 111 


Two things strike me in this double attack— 
on the one hand its timidity, yet gravity; on — 
the other, the powerful resistance which it en- 
counters. Nothing is less novel than a denial 
_ of the supernatural character of Christianity, and 
of its primitive facts, of its miracles, of the 
divinity of its founder. The eighteenth century 
carried on this war in a far more violent, rude, 
and iniquitous spirit than the nineteenth cen- 
tury has done. M. Renan, in the attempt to 
dethrone Jesus, has at least treated him with 
admiration and respect; not from calculation, 
I feel assured, but from the natural tone of his 
mind. Jn our time, men have instincts and | 
tastes, at once inconsequent and prudent; at 
the very time when they engage in a deadly 
struggle they affect to carry thither the cool 
impartiality of spectators; they flatter them- 
selves that they unite the acumen of the critic. 
to the feeling of the poet. The skeptic shows. 
no disinclination to play the mystic; and the 


erudite man strives to cover with the vail of 


112 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


fancy the ruin that he makes. Hume was a 
more stubborn skeptic, and Voltaire an enemy 
more daring. If I pass from philosophy to 
politics, and from books to events, I observe 
the war undergoing a similar transformation. 
‘What a contrast between the attacks of the 
Directory and the Emperor Napoleon the First 
upon the Papaey, and the circumspect and hesi- 
tating treatment of which, in spite of the blows 
that it receives, the Papacy is in these days the 
object? Are we to conclude that the general 
course of events has changed, and that the flood, 
which for a century whirled Europe along, is 
arrested and subsiding? Certainly not: there 
are abundant facts to prove the contrary. 
Whether regarded as a religious or a political 
question, whether considered as affecting opin- 
ions or interests, the contest between authority 
and liberty, between faith and incredulity, is 
carried on more earnestly and more systemat- 
ically now than ever: principles on each side 


are pushed to their extreme consequences, and 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANOE. 113 


contrasted in a manner never before the case. 
But experience imposes a restraint upon men 
even where it does not change them. In the 
years of internal order which the Empire in- 
sured, and in the years of liberty to which the 
constitutional Monarchy gave the sanction of its 
laws, the different parties learned to appreciate 
the obstacles with which they had to contend, 
and to measure their own strength and that of 
their opponents: they now know that every- 
thing is not possible to them; and necessity has 
inculcated a certain amount of equity and good 
sense. The experience of the past, as well as 
that of each day, convinces them of their ina- 
bility to insure a complete success to their 
systems and their designs, Its adversaries 
thought Christianity expiring; but they soon 
saw that it was still full of life: while they 
express their surprise and persevere in their 
wartare, they admit its practical influence, ren- 
der homage to’its moral value, and_ strive, 


although they contest its rights, to appropriate 
8 


114 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


to themselves the inheritance of its blessings. 
The wind has often blown from the right 
quarter for Catholic Absolutists during this 
century; they have enjoyed the favor of more 
than one master, and more than once they have 
requited him by devoted services. More than 
once, also, they have obtained from the supreme 
head of their Church official declarations, which 
have been used by them against the Catholic 
Liberals. The Absolutists, nevertheless, have 
not succeeded in changing the tendency of 
Christian societies; they have arrested the 
course neither of ideas nor events; their defeats 
have cost them dearer than their victories were 
worth; and in spite of the obstinate infatuation 
of parties, I doubt whether they themselves 
believe in the progress of their cause. And 
how- often has the Papacy itself in our days 
been insulted and despoiled? Has it not even 
been vanquished and expelled? Still, in spite 
of what it has suffered, sometifnes from revo-, 


lutions, sometimes from arbitrary power, it has 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 115 


outlived not only the triumphs of its enemies, 
but its own impolitic measures: and at this 
day, assailed by freethinkers in spirituals, by 
ambitious neighbors in temporals, menaced 
with abandonment even by its protectors, it is 
more energetically defended and efficaciously 
supported than it ever was at the commence- 
ment of this century in its reverses. Pius VIL 
never received such pecuniary contributions as 
have been forwarded to Pius IX. in his neces. 
sities; and if the French bishops were now 
summoned to a council, their conduct would, 
beyond doubt, be more dignified and more in- 
fluential than was that of their predecessors in 
1811. 

Why such changes in a situation itself in 
effect unchanged? Whence these hesitating 
measures, this embarrassed attitude of the ad- 

. versaries of the Christian faith and of the Chris- 
tian Church? What cause at the same time 
gives such boldness and even success to their 
defenders? — 


116 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


Each age has its own peculiar and charac- 
teristic mission, and one from which it cannot 
escape; every human being has his share in it, 
whether he knows it or not. Asa consequence 
of the truths and the errors, of the good and 
evil, of the triumphs and reverses of the pre- 
ceding centuries, the nineteenth century has 
before it a special task, which will employ all its 
energies, and which will also, I hope, constitute 
its glory. It has both in the State and in the 
Church found the two supreme forces that pre- 
side over man’s life, and over that of society, 
Authority and Liberty, in violent conflict, in 
turn intoxicated with victory, or vanquished, 
ruined. It is the mission of the nineteenth cen- 
tury to make them live together, and live in 
- peace; or at least in an antagonism entailing 
upon neither any mortal danger. ‘The recogni- 
tion of, and respect for, authority; the accept- 
ance and guarantee of freedom; these are the 
imperative necessities which our age is called 
upon to feel and to satisfy, both in State and 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 117 


Church. Nor does this imply, as is often pre- 
tended, any inconsistency or any compromise of 
principle or any policy of expedients; it is not 
by inconsistency that great questions are set- 
tled, it is not by expedients that we content the 
cravings of men’s souls, or calm the anxieties of 
human society ; for mankind yields genuine sub- 
mission and. feels real confidence only where it 
believes in the existence of truth and justice. 
The recognition, veneration, and guarantee of 
the different rights which co-exist naturally 
and necessarily in human societies—of the 
rights, both of individuals and of the State— 
of the rights of religious society and of civil 
society—of the rights of little local societies 
as well as of the grand general society—of the 
rights of conscience as well as of tradition—of 
the rights of the future as well as of those of 
the past—these are the dominant principles of 
which the nineteenth century has to insure the 
triumph. Triumphs assured, if Liberals and 
Christians are both of them determined to 


118 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


accomplish it! Notwithstanding all the violent 
emotions of party, and of all our differences on 
intellectual and social subjects, the conscious- 
ness of this situation is ever before our minds; 
and whether we admit it or not, the alliance of 
the liberal movement with the movement of — 
awakened Christianity, is the grand measure 
and the grand hope of the day. | 

A Catholic priest, now a bishop, inquiring 
the origin of the actual disputes of religion, and 
their probable issue, expresses himself as fol- 
lows:—*“ Free institutions, freedom of con- 
science, political liberty, civil liberty, individual 
liberty, liberty of families, of education, and of 
opinions, equality before the laws, the equal 
division of imposts and of public charges, these 
are all points upon which we make no difficulty; 
we accept them frankly; we appeal to them on 
solemn occasions of public discussion; we ac- 
cept, we invoke the principles and the liberties 
proclaimed in 1789; even those who combat 
those principles and those liberties admit that 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 119 


liberty of religion and free education have 
become acknowledged, self-evident truths—(des 
‘werités de bon sens).” * 

This Catholic, this bishop, is no timorous 
priest, disposed to make every sacrifice for the 
purpose of conciliation. It is the same priest, 
who, from the first attack made upon the con- 
stitution of the Catholic Church, has always 
distinguished himself by the warmth and ability 
with which he has defended it. ‘The Papacy, its 
rights, its temporal independence and spiritual 
sovereignty never had a champion more resolute, 
more opposed to weak concessions or fallacious 
compromises, more constantly intrepid in the 
breach than the Bishop of Orleans. 

When the contest was warmest, the Pope 
(Pius IX.) published his “Encyclical” of the 
8th of December, 1864. Exempt from every 
feeling of prejudice and hostility, and having 
no connection or relation with the Papacy to 


* De la Pacification religieuse. By the Abbé Dupanloup, 
pp. 268, 294, 306. Paris, 1845. 


120 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


make me pause, I feel no hesitation in saying 
what I think of this document, at once the oc- 
casion and the pretext for such a stir. In my 
opinion the error was a grave one. Regarded 
as doctrine, the “ Encyclical” was dignified and 
yet embarrassed, positive and yet evasive; it 
confounded in the same sweeping condemnation 
salutary truths and pernicious errors, the prin- 
ciples of liberty and the maxims of licentious- 
ness; it made an effort to maintain, in point of 
right, the ancient traditions and pretensions of 
Rome, without avowing in point of fact that 
the ideas and potent influences of modern civil- 
ization were the objects of its declared and un- 
ceasing hostility. In a system like that of the 
present day—a system of publicity and freedom 
of discussion—this manner of proceeding, its 
inconsistencies, its reticence, its obscurities, 
whether arising from instinct or premeditation, 
have ceased to be good policy, and in fact serve 
no purpose whatever. As a measure to meet a 


particular emergency, the “Encyclical” of the 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 121 


8th of December 1864 did not resemble that of 
Gregory XVI. in 1832; it was not called for by 
such extravagances as those of the Avenir, or 
those of the Abbé de la Mennais; no urgent 
necessity, no public exigency required that 
Rome should pronounce itself; the debate be- 
tween the Catholic Absolutists and the Catholic 
Liberals was of ancient date, and was evidently 
destined to long duration; the Papacy could 
not flatter itself that it could put an end to this 
contest by any peremptoriness of decision; her 
indulgent consideration was as due to the one 
party as to the other. Doubtless the Catholic 
Liberals had not shown less zeal for her cause, 
nor had the services which they had rendered 
been less important; it was not a moment of 
peril for Rome, and Rome was bound in justice, 
without any open declaration at least, to main- 
tain toward them an attitude of reserve. The 
party, even before the publication of the “En- 
cyclical,” had earned, as it still merits, her grati- 


tude and her esteem; neither M. de Montalem- 


122 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


bert, nor the Prince Albert de Broglie, nor 
M. de Falloux, nor M. Cochin, nor any of their 
friends had imitated the example of the Abbé 
de la Mennais; nor has one of them shown sub- 
sequently any irritation, or even uttered a word 
of complaint; they have maintained a respectful 
silence. The Bishop of Orleans has done even 
more. A man of action as well as of faith, he 
- thought in the midst of the storm excited by the 
“Encyclical” of the 8th of December, that he 
was bound to consider the perils rather than the 
faults, and that it became a priest who had sup- 
ported liberty to support authority also when 
the object of attack. He threw himself into 
the arena to cover the Papacy at all hazards 
with his valiant arms: after having played the 
part-of a sagacious counselor, he played that of 
a faithful champion, and he inflicted upon her 
adversaries blows so sturdy, that the latter were 
in their turn obliged to put themselves upon 
their defense, even in the midst of the success 
that the “Encyclical” had insured them. 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 123 


The Bishop of Orleans is probably reserved 
for many other struggles; he may even be hur- 
ried by a warlike temperament to carry the war 
into a field where it is uncalled for; but I shall 
be both surprised and grieved if he do not 
always remain what he is at this moment in the 
Church of France, the most enlightened repre- 
sentative of its mission, moral and social, as 
well as the most intrepid defender of its true 
and legitimate interests, 

Whether the matter in debate concerns relig- 
lous or social affairs and contests, parties are 
uable to two errors of equal gravity: they may 
misapprehend. their respective perils, or their 
respective strength. Wisdom consists in a just 
appreciation of these perils and of these forces, 
and it is upon such an appreciation precisely 
that success itself depends. The actual perils 
to which Catholicism is exposed are evident to 
all. It owes its development and its constitu. 
tion to times essentially different from the 


present. It adapts itself with reluctance to 


124 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


the principles required and the demands made 
upon it in this age. Its antagonists think and 
assert that it will never so adapt itself. Most 
of the lookers-on, who are indifferent or vacil- 
lating—and their number is great—incline to 
believe its antagonists in the right. This is the 
trial through which Catholicism is at this 
moment passing. To pass through it trrumph- 
antly, it has two great forces to rely upon; the 
one is, the reaction in favor of religion occasioned 
by the follies and the crimes of the Revolution, 
the other is, the liberal movement that took 
place among the Catholics after the faults of 
the Restoration, and the new opening made for 
them by the Government of 1830. ‘The Con- 
cordat built up again the edifice of the Cathole 
Church; Liberalism is laboring to penetrate tts 
sanctuary, and, without impairing its faith, to 
obtain for it once more the sympathies of civil 
government. Let sincere Catholics reflect well 
upon their course, for here is their main stay, 
here their best chance for the future; let them 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANOR, 125 


maintain with a firm hand the strong constitu- 
tion of their Church, but accept frankly, and at — 
once claim, their share also in the liberties of 
their age; let them take care of their anchors 
and spread their sails, for this is the conduct — 
prescribed to them by the supreme interest, 
which should be their law, the future interests, 
I mean, of Christianity. 

The time has been short, but the experiment 
has been made and is successful. I have now 
enumerated the principal events connected with 
religion which have taken place in the course 
of this century in the bosom of the Catholic 
Church of France. In spite of the obstacles, 
the oscillations, the deviations, and the faults 
that are remarkable, the awakening of Chris- 
tianity is evident. Under the influence of the 
causes which I have pointed out, Christian faith 
has evidently made progress; Christian science, 
progress; Christian charity, as shown by works, 
progress; Christian force, progress; progress 


incomplete and insufficient but. still progress, 


“wh 
126 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


real, and full of fruit, symptomatic of vital 


energy and future promise. Let not the ene- 


mies of Christianity deceive themselves ; they are : 


waging a combat of life and of death, but their 


antagonist is not in extremis! 


Il. AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 

I pass without any transitional stage from 
the awakening of Christianity in the Roman 
Catholic Church to the awakening of Chris- 
tianity in the Protestant Church. What need 


of a transition? Iam not quitting the Christian 


Church. With respect to their claims as Chris- 
tians, Protestant nations have been put to the 
test. They have had, like Catholic nations, to 
pass through violent struggles, to combat evil 
tendencies, to undergo perilous trials; but the 
' peculiar characteristic of Christianity, the simul- 
taneous action of faith and of science, of 


authority and liberty, has received a glorious 


~ 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 127 
] 


development in the bosom of Protestant nations. 
England and Holland, Protestant Germany, 
~ Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and the United 
States of America, have had their vices, their 
crimes, their sufferings, and their reverses; but, 
after all, these States have in the last four cen- 
turies labored with effect at the solution, in a 
Christian sense, of that grand problem of 
human society—the moral and physical progress 
of the masses, as well as the political guarantee 
of their rights and liberties. And in these 
days the States to which I have alluded resist 
effectually the shocks—now of anarchy, now of 
despotism, which alternately trouble the peace 
of Christendom. As for the Christian Faith 
itself, if, in Protestant countries, it does not 
escape the attacks elsewhere made upon it, 
neither is it without its powerful defenders and . 
faithful followers. In those countries, Christian 
Churches are full of adherents, and the cause of 
Christianity finds every day valiant champions 


to devote to its service the arms which science 


128 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


and liberty supply. There is on the part of 
the Romanists a puerile infatuation upon this 
subject, which makes them absolutely close 
their eyes to facts; by an error fatal to them- 
selves, they persist In imputing the ferment- 
ation in society, and the abandonment of relig- 
ion, to the influence of the Protestant nations 
—nations among whom these two scourges 
are combated with at least as much resolution 
and effect as elsewhere. It is not my wish to 
institute disparaging comparisons, or to foment 
a rivalry opposed to the spirit of Christ’s re- 
ligion. Protestantism is not, in Christendom, 
the last, neither is it the sole bulwark of Chris- 
tianity; but there exists none that is stronger, 
that offers fewer weak points to assailants, or 
that is better provided with faithful and able 
defenders. 

At the commencement of this century, and in 
the years which followed the promulgation of 
the Concordat, the Protestants, like the Catho- 
lics in France, thought only of the re-establish- 


_ AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 129 


ment of their worship and of the liberty of their 
faith. A liberty the more precious in their 
eyes, as it followed upon two centuries of perse- 
cutions and of sufferings of which we cannot, in 
these days, read the accounts without mingled 
sentiments of astonishment, of indignation, and 
of sorrow. Faithfully should men guard the 
memory of such outrages; they would be in- 
finitely better than they are if they had always 
present to their minds the vivid pictures of the 
iniquities and woes which fill the page of their 
history; and evils would not so soon reeur if 
they were not so soon forgotten. The system 
of Terrorism under the Revolution had con. 
founded Catholic and Protestant in a common 
oppression; it had abolished the forms of wor. 
ship of each, denied all free expression of _ 
opinion to Christians; and without distinction 
condemned to the same scaffold the « pastors of 
the desert” and the bishops of the Court of 
Versailles—Rabaut Saint-Etienne as well as the 


nuns of Verdun. When this terrible régime 
9 


180 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


had ceased to exist, neither party had religiously 
or politically any desires or pretensions that 
were not extremely moderate: the one thing 
regarded by all as the sovereign good was, the 
right to live without molestation and the liberty 
to address their prayers to God in the light of 
day. No other subject so seriously interested 
- them; and they heartily wished to show their 
gratitude and deference to the Government, 
which, while it gave security to their bodies, 
permitted their souls to breathe freely. The 
condition of the Protestants was in one sense 
better than that of the Catholics, for the former 
were now experiencing the joy, not only of a 
deliverance but of a positive conquest; they had 
just escaped as well from the system of Terror- 
ism, as from the ancient régime; they had lost 
nothing to regret; no revengeful feeling made 
them desire a reaction; their sole aspiration 
was for the consolidation of their rights, and of 
their new acquisitions. “ You who lived, as we 


did, under the yoke of intolerance,” (thus they 


; 


* 
_ AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 131 


were addressed in 1807 by M. Rabaut-Dupuy, 
formerly president of the legislative body, and 
the last surviving son of one of their most es- 
timable pastors,) “you, the relics of so many 
persecuted generations, behold! compare! It 
is no longer in the desert and at the peril of 
your lives that you render to the Creator the 
homage which is his due. Our temples are 
restored to us, and every day beholds new ones 
erected. Our pastors are recognized as public 
functionaries; they receive salaries from the 
State; a barbarous law no longer suspends the 
sword over their heads. Alas! to those whom 
we have survived it was permitted, it is true, to 
ascend Mount Nebo, and to obtain thence a 
glimpse of the promised land, but it is we alone 
who have taken possession.” 

What wonder if, on the morrow after the 
Concordat, which had procured them the free 
exercise of their faith and the impartiality of 
the law, the Protestants acquiesced without dif. 


ficulty in the incomplete organization with 


132 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


which the new system had left their Church, 
and that they troubled themselves little with 
the attacks made upon its independence and 
its dignity ! 

But this modest enjoyment of their new priv- 
ileges did not render them indifferent to their 
ancient belief, and they returned to the open 
practice of Christ’s faith simultaneously with 
the acquisition of their liberty. In 1819, in the 
midst of the profound silence which reigned 
throughout the Empire, a professor of the 
faculty of Protestant theology at Montauban, 
M. Gase, attacked, in his: teaching, the dogma 
of the Trinity. Earnest remonstrances were 
instantly made from the general body of the - 
Protestants in France; a great number of con- 
sistories, among others those of Nimes, of 
Montpellier, Montauban, Alais, Anduze, Saint 
Hippolyte, pastors and laity, addressed their 
complaints, some to the “ Doyen” of the faculty 
of theology, others to M. Gasc himself, demand- 


ing, all of them, the maintenance of the doc- 


AWAKENING OF OHRISTIANITY IN FRANOE, 133 


trme of the Protestant Church. The grand 
master of the University, M. de Fontanes, 
“earnestly mvited the professor not to depart 
from it,” and M. Gasc himself admitted that his 
teaching ought to be in conformity. The spirit 
which had animated the Reformation in France 
in the sixteenth century was still living in 
the nineteenth; and under the new-born Sys 
tem of liberty, the Awakening of Christianity 
announced itself by a summons to the faith. 
When, under the Restoration, France had re- 
gained her political liberty, it was not long 
before that liberty bore its natural fruits in 
French Protestantism ; it was accompanied, both 
on religious and political subjects, by the mani- 
festation of discordant ideas and discordant 
tendencies, which were soon to struggle for vic- 
tory. As at epochs of great intellectual crises 
eminent men emerge who represent dominant 
ideas, so now M. Samuel Vincent and M. Daniel 
Encontre immediately appeared in the Protest- 


ant Church: both were pastors, and each wor. 


1384 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


thily represented one of the two principles 
which naturally develop themselves in the bo- 
som of Protestantism, faith in traditions and 
the right of private judgment; principles dif 
ferent without being contradictory; principles 
which may subsist in peace provided they re- 
main respectively in their proper places, and 
within the limits of their rights. M. Samuel 
Vincent was a man of a mind remarkably com- 
prehensive and of great versatility and fecundity ; 
but his habits at the same time were those of a 
student, fitting him rather for intellectual medi- 
tation than qualifying him either for expansive 
sympathies or for action; he was versed in the 
philosophy and erudite criticism of Germany, at 
that time novel and rare to France; he made 
the essence of Christianity, according to his own 
expression, “to consist in the liberty of in- 
quiry.”* He rejected all written articles of 
faith, every limited idea of religious unity, and 


* Vues sur le protestantisme en France, par M. Samuel 
Vincent. 2° édition, p. 15. Paris, 1859. 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 135 
# 


claimed within the Church, for both pastors and 
congregation, the greatest latitude in matters 
of opinion and of teaching. But when he clung 
closely to this view of the subject, and was 
pressed to indicate the extreme point to which, 
within the Church itself, the diversity of men’s 
individual beliefs might be carried,-his embar- 
rassment became extreme, for he had too much 
sense to admit that this diversity had no limit, 
and that a Church, whether Protestant or not, 
could exist without certain articles of faith 
common to all ‘its members, and recognized by 
them all. “ Protestantism,” said he himself, 
“must not be merely a negation; it should also 
have its real and positive side ; it must be beyond 
all things a religion; that is to say, it must be 
in the possession of the means to endure and of 
the means to edify men by the propagation of 
a doctrine benevolent and Christian. ... Chris- 
tianity is the basis of ecclesiastical teaching.” * 


* Vues sur le protestantisme en France, par M. Samuel 
Vincent, pp. 17, 22. 


1386 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


When, after having laid down this principle, 
M. Samuel Vincent inquired how the Protestant 
Church could remain a Church, and a Christian 
Church, in the midst of the independence of 
individual beliefs, he found no other way out 
of the difficulty than “to determine,” he said, 
“by conventions, oral and unwritten, a certain 
number of opinions that each man should, in 
the interest of the general peace, be entreated 
to keep to himself”* How strange a proceed- 
ing, how difficult of realization, to prescribe 
with once voice silence and liberty ! M. Samuel 
Vincent did not attempt to determine what 
those opinions were which, in order to maintain 
the existence of a Christian Church in the midst 
of the broadest system of free inquiry, “ each 
man should be entreated to keep to himself” 
As for himself, he professed his faith in the 
supernatural, in the revelation of the Old and 
of the New Testaments, in the inspiration of 
the Scriptures, in the divinity of Jesus Christ; 


* Vues sur le protestantisme en France, p. 24. 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 137 


in the grand historical facts as well as in the 
moral precepts of the Gospel; he was one of 
the pastors, too, who signed the remonstrance 
of the consistory of Nimes, for the irregularity 
in preaching of which Professor Gase had been 
guilty. Did M. Samuel Vincent regard every 
opinion contrary to these great evangelical doc- 
trines as an opinion which each man should, in 
the interest of the general peace, be entreated 
to keep to himself? I doubt whether he would 
have dared to engraft upon the liberty of judg- 
ment such a reservation ; but I doubt at the 
same time if he would have persisted in regard- 
ing as true and faithful pastors of the Protest, 
ant Church, men who should have openly 
deserted and combated, in its most essential 
foundations, that Christian faith which he 
himself professed. He dreaded almost equally 
“unity defined,” and “dissent declared.” He 
would have remained in the embarrassment 
into which those inevitably fall who neither 


accept one basis and manifesto of a common 


138 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


faith, nor vitae the moral necessity of a sepa- 
ration into free and distinct Churches when a 
common faith does not exist.* 

No such embarrassment was experienced by 
M. Daniel Encontre when he began his career 
to serve the movement of awakened Christianity 
in the bosom of French Protestantism. I will 
not venture here to cite the precise words, harsh 
and severe, employed by him on the 13th of 
December, 1816, at Montauban, in his capacity 
of “Doyen” of the faculty of Protestant The- 
ology, respecting those termed. by him “the 
pretended ministers of the Gospel, disbelievers 


in the Gospel and in the divinity of Jesus 


* The principal works of M. Samuel Vincent are: 

1. Vues sur le protestantisme en France, premiére édition. 
2 vols. 8vo, 1829. <A second edition, in 1 vol. 12mo., was 
published in 1859 by M. Prévost-Paradol. 

2. Observations sur l’unité religieuse et observations sur la 
voie dautorité appliquée 4 la religion, (1820,) contre l’Essai 
sur l’indifférance en matiére de religion de Abbé de la Men- 
nails, 

8. Méditations ou recueil de sermons, 1829. 

4, Mélanges de religion de morale et de critique sacrée. A 
periodical published from 1820 to 1825. 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 139 


Christ.” He regarded harmony of faith and 
language, harmony between shepherd and flock, 
as the first law of religious society. Born in a 
grotto of La Vaunage, to which his mother had 
fled to escape from the flames of persecution ; 
devoted from his birth by his father, the Pastor 
Pierre Encontre, to the service of a “preacher in 
the desert,’ M. Daniel Encontre belonged to 
that class of indomitable Protestants who cling — 
to their faith through all the perils, sufferings, 
and sacrifices which it entails. His first steps 
in life seemed to indicate in him other aptitudes, 
and to promise for him a different career. 
After having studied divinity at Lausanne and 
at Geneva, and been consecrated by his father 
himself to the ministry of the Gospel “in an as- 
sembly in the desert,” he seemed to doubt his’ 
own vocation; for while performing the fune- 
tions of his ministry he devoted himself to the 
study of mathematics, physics, philosophy, and. 
the classical languages, with an enthusiasm 


eager to become familiar with every depart- 


140 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANOE, 


ment of knowledge, and encountering no hin- 
derance from internal obstacles or from precon- 
ceived opinions, Having established himself 
at Montpellier, where his taste for science found 
subjects of gratification, he led there, during the 
dark days of the Revolution, a life very obscure, 
and at the same time most laborious; giving 
lessons to the master masons upon stone-cutting, 
imparting instruction, rendering the aids of 
religion to Protestants, celebrating the baptis- 
mal and marriage services, and pursuing at the 
same time his labors in geometry, botany, phi- 
losophy, divinity, literature, and even poetry. 
When order began to be re-established, he was 
led by his own natural tastes and the counsel 
of his friends to select as his career that of 
public instruction. He competed for and ob- 
tained, first the appointment of professor of lit- 
erature at the Ecole Centrale of Montpellier ; 
then that of the higher mathematics, at the 
Lycée and in the faculty of science, of which he 


was nominated “Doyen.” As his merits estab- 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 141 


lished themselves by repeated proofs, his repu- 
tation increased; the papers of learned societies 
were filled with his contributions, and the Ecole 
Polytechnique with his pupils. “I have met in 
our department,” said Fourcroy, “two or three 
heads equal to his, but not one superior.” M. de 
Candolle gladly selected him to aid him in his 
“ Researches respecting the Botany of the An- 
cients ;” and M. de Fontanes has more than once 
spoken of him to me as one of the men who 
most honored the University. But in him, 
neither the mathematician, the botanist, nor the 
philologist took precedence of the Christian. 
At one time as expounder of Moses and of 
Genesis,* at another as a writer defending the 


Apostles, accused of being a copyist of Plato,+ 


* Dissertation sur le vrai systéme du monde comparé avec le 
récit que Moise fait de la création. Montpellier, 1807. 

t Lettre a M. Combes-Dounous, auteur d’un Essai historique 
sur Platon. Paris, 1811, 

A remarkable essay of M. Daniel Encontre, “sur le Péché 
original,” was published, after hig death, in 1822, and he left 
a »_Breat number of manuscripts, among others a “Traité sur 
l’Eglise, ” (600 pages,) written in Latin; “ Etudes théologiques,” 


* "Ps 


te 
7 


’ 
142 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


he neglected no occasion of placing his scientific. 
attainments at the service of Christianity; and 
when, in 1814, he was asked to quit Montpel- 
lier, to abandon his habits, his tastes, and his 
friends, for the chair of the professorship of 
divinity at Montauban, where he was to fulfill 
the functions of “Doyen,” he sacrificed without 
hesitation the enjoyment of his life to his relig- 
ious vocation, and applied himself with unceas- 
ing energy to the warlike activity of a Christian 
professor, until the day when, overcome by 
fatigue and sickness, he accorded to himself the 
melancholy satisfaction of returning to Mont- 
pellier, in order to die near the tomb of a be 
loved daughter, who had long aided him in his 
labors. | 

a Hebrew Grammar, a “Cours de philosophie,” a “Cours de 
littérature Frangaise,” a “Flore biblique,” several “‘ Mémoires 
de mathématiques transcendantes,” etc. As a teacher of trans- 
cendental mathematics at Montpellier he had as pupil M. 
Auguste Comte, the head of the “Ecole positiviste,” who, in 
spite of the profound diversity of their opinions, regarded it as 


a duty to dedicate to him in 1856 his treatise, “ Sur la Synthése 
subjective,” in testimony of admiration and of gratitude. 


ee 


% 
AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 143 


The destinies of Protestantism in France 
have, to a singular degree, been at once varied 
and uniform, confused and simple. After 
having in the sixteenth century valiantly dis- 
puted the victory, it was vanquished, decimated, 
expelled. But it resisted, and survived not 
only its defeat, but the gradual process of its 
enfeeblement and its expulsion. In the course 
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the 
French Protestants lost the protection of the 
laws, their secure sanctuaries, their great chiefs, 
their great divines, their great writers; but 
they preserved nevertheless their faith and their 
religious honor. In the times that ensued 
their successors remained faithful to the belief 
and the customs of their fathers; even perse- 
cuted and condemned to death, having their 
property confiscated, or become tenants of 
prisons and laborers in the galleys, they found 
in their very sufferings a resource to confirm 
them in the principles of Protestant piety. 


Theological controversies died away from 


144 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


among them, leaving behind them the funda- 
mentals of Christianity—living and guiding 
principles, 

Among the higher and wealthier classes, the 
philosophical ideas of the eighteenth century 
made also their way; the great liberal move- 
ment filled the Protestant section of the nation 
with joy, and commanded its sympathy without 
detaching it from its religious habits and tradi- 
tions. In its members faith had ceased to be 
erudite; the popular Protestant sentiment had 
been always profoundly biblical and evan- 
gelical. Freer and more fortunately situated 
than their fathers, the French Protestants now 
anxiously desired to remain, as they had been, 
Christians; and when, in 1790, Rabaut Saint- 
Etienne, who succeeded the Abbé de Montes- 
quieu as President of the Constituent Assembly, 
wrote to his aged father, the Pastor Paul 
Rabaut, “The President of the National As- 
sembly is at your feet,” he manifested to the 
humble and zealous preacher in the assemblies 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 145 


of the desert, the pride at once of a politi- 
cian, the piety of a son, and the fidelity of a 
Protestant. 

M. Daniel Encontre was, at the commence- 
ment of the nineteenth century, the faithful 
representative of this traditionally religious 
character of French Protestantism; just as M. 
Samuel Vincent was the well-meaning and sin- 
cere introducer to it of the science and criticism 
of the Germans. The former corresponded 
more closely to the pious and national spirit of 
Protestant France of the olden times; the 
latter to the tendencies, at once novel and in- 
definitely latitudinarian, of a foreign philosophy 
and a foreign erudition. Doubtless, neither 
measured the range of the religious crisis of 
which they were themselves the symptoms; 
neither foresaw that within the bosom of Prot- 
estantism that crisis was to be marked by an 
avowed struggle between Rationalism in its 
progress and Christianity in 1ts reaction. 


This crisis began to manifest itself at Geneva. 
10 


146 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


The mocking skepticism of Voltaire, the rhetor- 


: 
4 


ical deism of Rousseau, proclaimed at its gates, _ : 
fe 


had deeply undermined the faith of Christ in | 


the very city of Calvin. It was not merely 
some of the Calvinistic doctrines of the sixteenth 
century that the pastors of Geneva doubted or 
denied, but it was also the fundamental articles 
of Christianity; they abandoned not only the 
dogmas of predestination and salvation by 
faith alone, but the dogmas of original sin, 
and of the divinity of Jesus Christ. In 1810 
according to some, as far back as 1802 according 
to others, symptoms of an evangelical reaction 
showed themselves at Geneva among the 
students in theology, some of whom afterward 
became distinguished pastors or writers. It 
was not long before MM. Gaussen, Malan, Gon- 
thier, Bost, Merle d’Aubigné, displayed their 
orthodox fervor and their ability. In 1816 a 
pious Scot, Mr. Robert Haldane, previously an 
intrepid sailor, who had only quitted his calling 


to devote himself entirely to the service of his ‘ 


4 


AWAKENING OF OHRISTIANITY IN FRANOR. 147 


faith, went to Geneva, and contracted with the 


: _ young Methodists of that city relations of the 


_ greatest intimacy and activity. They had meet- 


ings; they discussed, they preached, they prayed, 
they wrote. Mr. Haldane could hardly express 
himself in French ; having his English Bible con- 
tinually at hand, he turned over its pages inces- 
santly, pomted out to his friends the passages 
that he regarded as decisive, invited them to 
read them aloud from their French Bible, and 
then commented upon them in a manner that 
always commanded their favorable attention, 
the conviction of the commentator had such 
moving and persuasive power.* 

In 1816 and 1817 the evangelical reaction 
made rapid progress, and the body of Gene- 
vese pastors resolved to combat it by the voice 
of authority. They found, however, no better 


method of doing so than by insisting upon 


* Genéve religieuse au XIX siécle: par le Baron de Goltz; 
traduit de l’allemand par OC. Malan: 8vo., pp. 187-149. Genéve 
et Paris. 1862, 


148 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


what, twelve years later, even M. Samuel Vin- 
cent did not scruple to recommend; they pre- 
scribed silence even whilst they proclaimed 
liberty. “ Without ”—these are their words— 
“giving any judgment upon the questions 
really involved, and without controlling in any 
respect the liberty of opinions,” they imposed a 
solemn engagement both upon students de- 
manding to be consecrated to the sacred minis- 
try, and upon ministers candidates for pastoral 
functions in the Church of Geneva. It was 
conceived as follows: “As long as we reside 
and preach in the churches of the Canton of 
Geneva, we promise to abstain from establishing, 
either in entire discourses or in parts of dis- 
courses directed to this object, our opinion— 
first, of the manner in which the divine nature 
was incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ; 
secondly, of original sin; thirdly, of the mode 
in which grace operates, or grace is efficient; 
fourthly, of predestination. We promise also 


not to combat, in any public discourse, the 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 149 


opinion of any pastors or ministers touching 
these subjects.” * 

It is difficult to understand how men ever 
could have flattered themselves with the hope 
of re-establishing peace in the Church by the 
employment of so sorry an expedient. Liberty, 
that has rent asunder such heavy chains, does 
not permit itself to be confined by so flimsy a 
net. The immediate effect of the regulation of 
the Genevese pastors was an outburst of dis- 
content. The more violent Methodists, MM. 
- Malan and Bost at their head, proclaimed aloud 
their separation from the established Church ; 
the more moderate, among others, MM. Gaussen 
and Merle d’Aubigné, persisted in remaining, 
by right of their ministry, in its bosom, holding 
themselves responsible representatives there of 
the doctrines of the Reformation, which, in 
fact, they did continue to preach and to teach. 
The body of pastors at first used great for- - 


* Genéve religieuse au XIX siécle: par le Baron de Goltz ; 
p. 153. | 


150 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


bearance toward them, and respected their lib- 
erty; and when the populace, irritated at the 
agitation caused in families by the Dissenters, 
and offended by the austerity of their precepts, 
made hostile demonstrations toward them, the 
Council of Geneva had the wisdom and fairness 
to use measures of repression; but, soon be- 
coming weary of this painful duty, the Council 
formally forbade, without its express permission, 
any book of religious controversy to be printed 
at Geneva. The body of pastors soon pro- 
nounced as vehement a condemnation of the. 
moderate Methodists as of the ultra Dissenters, 
The moderate Methodists then in their turn re- 
sorted to energetic measures in support of their 
cause: they founded an evangelical society and 
a school of theology; devoted the one to propa- 
gate the zeal and the other to teach the prin- 
ciples of the Christian reaction; and fifteen 
years after the commencement of the struggle, 
the chiefs of the party which had proclaimed 
that the free divergence of individual belief in 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 151 


the bosom of the Church was “the great fact of 
our epoch, and the great step that the Refor- 
mation had in our days to make”—these chiefs, 
being the body of pastors, the Consistory, and 
the Council of State at Geneva, suspended M. 
Gaussen from his functions of pastor in the 
parish of Satigny for having taken part in the 
organization of an independent form of worship, 
and of a school of independent theology; “a 
proceeding,” they said, “incompatible with the 
peace of the Church, and to be regarded as an 
act of insubordination, tending to bring eccle- 
siastical authority into discredit.” * 

Such religious ferment in the primitive home 
of the French Reformation, and at the very 
gates of France, could not fail to exercise a 
powerful influence upon the French Protestant 
Church. On quitting Geneva in 1817, Mr. 
Robert Haldane proceeded to Montauban, 


where he formed friendships with some of the 


* Genéve religieuse au XIX siécle: par le Baron de Goltz; 
pp. 379-884. 


152 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


Professors of the Faculty, and among others 
with M. Daniel Encontre. He published there 
also a work in French, which his friends hast- 
ened to circulate. It was styled “Emmanuel: 
vues Scripturaires sur Jésus-Christ.” In 1818, 
a society formed in England, named the “Con. 
tinental Society,” specially devoted itself to the 
purpose of seconding on the Continent the 
progress of this Christian reaction, An English 
dissenter, Mr. Mark Wilks, pastor of the Amer. 
ican community formed at Paris, was the most 
efficient agent of the societies which had this 
object in view. “It might be said of Mr. 
Wilks,” wrote lately the Pastor Juillerat, “that 
he might have governed an empire, his character 
was so energetic, his mind so active and enter- 
prising. He brought me aid of every descrip. 
tion: money was required, he had money ; 
pamphlets and books were wanted, no one was 
better provided; no one understood better the 
details pertaining to the printing and publi- 


cation of papers.” Several Protestant journals 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 153 


and magazines, “La Voix de la Religion Chré- 
tienne au XIX siécle,” “Les Archives du Chris- 
tianisme au XIX siécle,” “Les Mélanges de Re- 
ligion, de Morale, et de Critique Sacrée,” 
“T’Evangeliste,” “La Revue Protestante,” “Le 
Semeur,” etc, etc, were at this epoch success- 
ively founded and carried in different directions 
throughout the scattered Protestant Church, 
from its central organization, the fervor which 
had there been kindled. Genuine zeal for re- 
ligion is not satisfied by action from a distance, 
or by action upon unknown persons, or by in- 
direct means, as by books and by journals: it 
demands direct oral communication from man 
to man—the union of men’s souls in common 
prayer. Certain young pastors who had at 
first shared in the evangelical movement at 
Geneva, MM. Neff, Pyt, Bost, Gonthier, scat: 
tered themselves over France, some assuming 
functions as local pastors, others as traveling 
missionaries, attracting to their proximity 


groups of zealous Protestants, animating the 


154 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


lukewarm, and erecting in every place where 
they made any stay little centers of Christianity, 
which radiated to the neighboring country 
around, Distinct associations, some officially 
recognized by the State, others having no public 
character,* gave to the labors of isolated individ- 
uals the publicity, the unity, the permanence 
which they required ; and a special organization 
(colportage biblique) which at its commence- 
ment numbered only seven, but a few years 
afterward had sixty agents, all of them, al- 
though obscure individuals, as zealous as their 
patrons were zealous, caused the Holy Scrip- 
tures and religious tracts to penetrate into parts 
of France hopelessly inaccessible to any other 
method of communication and of instruction. 
To a movement so earnest and so general, 


although propagated by a small number of per- 


*La Société biblique, la Société pour Pencouragement de 
instruction primaire parmi les protestants, la Société évan- 
gélique de France, la Société des traités religieuse, la Société 
des missions protestantes, la Société centrale pour les intéréts 
protestants, la Société d’évangelisation, etc. 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 155 


sons in the heart of a population itself forming 
but a small minority in the nation at large, 
obstacles would inevitably occur. They were 
encountered on all hands and of all kinds, relig- 
ious and political—from the administration, 
from popular prejudices, from the distrust of 
the Government, from the hostility of the 
Roman Catholic clergy, from differences of 
opinion on theological points among Protestants 
themselves, from the amour propre of indi- 
viduals, and the perplexed or timorous ideas of 
subalterns in authority. The activity of the 
Protestant societies created uneasiness in bishops 
and priests, who strove not merely to counteract 
their influence, but to interfere with their 
liberty of action. Mayors of towns, judges of 
the peace, sometimes too, magistrates and ad- 
ministrators of more elevated rank, lent their 
aid to these exceptionable proceedings. Hence 
arose suspicions, complaints, and struggles 
which retarded the new-born impulse of awak- 


ening Christianity. But the earnest persever- 


156 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


ance of its patrons, the general wisdom of the 
supreme Government, and the authority, grow- 
ing more and more each day, of the principles 
of justice and of liberty, gradually surmounted 
all these obstacles. It was the Restoration that 
recognized the chief Protestant societies and 
gave them the sanction of the law. Under the 
Government of 1830 they used their rights with 
more confidence and fewer hinderances. The 
equitable intentions of King Louis Philippe and 
of his counselors upon religious matters could 
not be doubtful, whatever their caution not to 
cause uneasiness or wound the susceptibilities 
of the Roman Catholics. The Protestants now 
believed it to be no longer necessary to look to 
foreign support. Formed at Paris in 1833, the 
Evangelical Society of France experienced a 
momentary impulse of national jealousy, the 
result of which was some coldness in its rela- 
tions with the Continental Society of London; 
but as soon as the latter perceived that its 


direct interference was rather an embarrassment 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 157 
' y & 
than a necessity to the Christian reaction in 


France, it withdrew its agency without with- 
holding its sympathy, and handed over to the 
Evangelical Society of France all the “stations” 
and religious charities which had up to that 
time been founded by its exertions. 

The awakening of Christianity among the 
Protestants of France had now produced. such 
results that it mattered little who the patrons 
of the movement might be; it had assumed its 
true character, and was drawing its strength 
from the fountain of truth. In times of relig- 
ious incredulity and of religious indifference, 
and even in the transitional times which imme- 
diately ensue, it is the error of many, and even 
of men who respect and support religion, to 
consider it in the light of a great political in- 
stitution—a salutary system of moral police, 
however necessary to society, indebted for its 
merits and its prerogatives rather to its practical 
utility than to its intrinsic truth. Grave error, 


misconceiving both the nature and the origin 


* An 


» 


158 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 
‘ 


of religion, and calculated to deprive it both of 
its empire and its dignity! Utility men hold as 
of great account, but it is only truth that com- 
mands unconditional surrender. Utility en- 
joms prudence and forbearance; truth alone 
inspires feelings of confidingness and devotion. 
A religion having no other guarantee for its in- 
fluence and its endurance than its social utility 
would be very near its ruin. Men have need of, 
nay, they thirst for truth in their relations with 
God, even more than in their relations with one 
another; the spontaneous prayer, adoration, 
obedience, suppose faith. It was in the very 
name of the verity of the Christian religion, of 
that verity manifested in its history by the 
word and even by the presence of God, that the 
awakening of Christians was accomplished 
among us. ‘The laborers in this great work 
felt the faith of Christianity, and they diffused 
it; had they spoken only of the social utility 
of Christianity, they would never have made 


the conquest of a single human soul. 


5: “she 
AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 159 
a 


At first sight one is tempted to attribute this 
success to energy of faith on the part of these 
laborers in the cause, to the active and devoted 
perseverance of their zeal. Again a mistake! 
Not that human merit was without its share in 
the results; but even where the faith was thus 
propagated, the share that that faith itself had 
in the result was infinitely greater, from its own 
proper and inherent virtue, than any share of 
men. Incredulity and indifferentism may dif. 
fuse themselves and pretend to dominate; they 
leave unsolved the problems that lie in the 
depth of man’s soul: they do not rid him of his 
perplexities, of instinct or of reflection, as to the 
world’s creation and man’s creation, the origin 
of good and evil, providence and fate, human 
liberty and human responsibility, man’s immor- 
tality and his future state. Instead of the 
denials and the doubts that had been thrown 
over these unescapable questions, those who 
applied themselves fully to rouse awakened 
Christianity, recalled the human soul to the 


160 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


memory of positive solutions of these questions ; 
solutions in accordance with the traditions of 
their native land, in accordance with their 
habits as members of families, and in harmony 
with the recollections of early childhood; solu- 
tions often contested, never refuted; always 
recurring in the lapse of ages, and century after 
century! It was from the intrinsic and per: 
manent value of the doctrines which they were 
preaching, and not from themselves, that the 
laborers in the work derived their force and 
their credit. 

They had another principle of force as well; 
a force born and developed in the bosom of the 
Christian religion, and in that alone; they had 
the passionate desire to save human souls. 
Men are not, they never have been, struck as 
they ought to have been struck with the beauty 
of this passion, or with its novelty in the moral 
history of the world, or with the part that it 
has played among Christian nations. Before 


the era of Christianity, in times of Asiatic and 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 161 


European antiquity, pagans and philosophers 
busied themselves about the destiny of men 
after the close of their earthly life, and with 
curiosity, too, did they sound the obscurity ; but 
the ardent solicitude for the eternal welfare 
of human souls, the never-wearying labor to 
prepare human souls for eternity—to set them 
even during this existence in intimate relations 
with God, and to prepare them to undergo 
God’s judgments ;—we have in all this a fact 
essentially Christian, one of the sublimest 
characteristics of Christianity, and one of the 
most striking marks of its divine origin. God 
constantly in relation with mankind and with 
every man, God present during the actual life 
of every man, and God the arbiter of his 
future destiny; the immortality of each human 
soul, and the connection between his actual 
life and hig future destiny; the. immense 
value of each human soul in the eyes of God, 
and the immense import to the soul of the 


future that awaits it: these are the convictions 
11 


162 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


and the affirmations all implied in the one pas- 
sion alluded to, the passion for the salvation of 
men’s souls, which was the whole life of our 
Saviour Jesus Christ, which passed by his 
example and by his precepts into the life of 
his primitive disciples, and which, amid the 
diversities of age, people, manners, opinions, 
has remained the characteristic feature and 
the inspiring breath of the genius of Christian- 
ity; breath which animated the men who in 
our days labored, and with success, to revive 
Christian faith among the Protestants of France ! 

Their zeal was employed in a very circum- 
scribed sphere; beyond it their names were 
unknown, and unknown they have remained, 
What spectators, what readers, what public 
knew at that time, or know even at this 
moment, what manner of men they were or 
what their deeds—those men who called them- 
selves Neff, Bost, Pyt, Gonthier, Audebez, Cook, 
Wilks, Haldane? But who, I would ask, in 
the time of Tacitus and of Pliny, knew what 


ae 
AWAKENING OF OHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 163 


manner of men they were, and what the deeds 
of Peter, Paul, John, Matthew, Philip—the un- 
known disciples of the Master, unknown him- 
self, who had overcome the world? Notoriety 
is not essential to influence; and in the sphere 
of the soul, as in the order of nature, fountains 
are not the less abundant because their springs 
are hidden in obscurity. The Christian mis- 
slonaries of our time did not trouble themselves 
to lessen that obscurity. ‘To literary celebrity 
they had no pretension, nor did they seek the 
triumph of any political idea, of any specific 
system of ecclesiastical organization, of any 
favorite plan in which their personal vanity 
was interested: the salvation of human souls 
was their only passion, and their only object. 
They looked upon themselves as humble serv- | 
ants commissioned +o remind men of promises 
which they had forgotten—of promises of | 
salvation by faith in Jesus, “The stir of the re- 
action,” one of themselves has said, “bore im. 


pressed upon it the character of youth, or even of 


164 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


childhood. The humblest pastor on his circuit 
became a missionary; his transit was regarded 
almost like that of a meteor. On the instant 
an assembly was convoked, it numbered twenty, 
thirty, fifty, a hundred, two hundred persons, 
collected to listen joyfully, as if it were a great 
novelty or miracle, to that Gospel which we 
know by heart ;—alas! which we know by heart 
far more than we have it in the heart!” * 

Who could mistake, on hearing such senti- 
ments and such language, the really Christian 
character of the reaction? 

Never-ending weakness of man’s nature, and 
inevitable imperfection of man’s work, even 
when man is walking in the ways of God! In 
the midst of awakening Christianity, and of 
this fervent return to the faith of the Gospel, 
reappeared some of the ancient pretensions of 


theology, and among others the pretension to 


* Mémoires pouvant servir 4 Vhistoire du réveil religieux des 
églises protestantes de la Suisse et de la France, par A. Bost, 
(1854,) t. 1, p. 240. 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 165° 


penetrate the decrees of God and to define the 
terms of man’s salvation. 

In February, 1818, the pious and orthodox 
“Doyen” of the Protestant Faculty of Montau- 
ban, M. Daniel Encontre, rendering an account of 
the work of Mr. Robert Haldane, (Emmanuel, 
ou vues Scripturaires sur Jésus-Christ,) which 
had just appeared, hastened, after having justly 
commended it, to add: “'The concluding pages 
of the ‘Emmanuel’ express sentiments which 
Evangelical Christians are far from sharing. 
The author lays down the principle, that all 
men who do not believe in the perfect equality 
of the Son and of the Father, are enemies alike 
of both Father and Son; that they deny, and 
blaspheme against both, and cannot avoid eter. 
nal death. He regards the forbearance we show 
to them as infinitely criminal, and seems even ; 
inclined to condemn all who have not the cour- 
age to condemn them.. As for me, I venture to 
believe that it is the duty of a Christian to work 


out his own salvation without allowing him- 


166 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


self to pronounce upon the salvation of others. 
Judge not, that ye be not judged, says He whom 
we all acknowledge as our Master; and St. Paul 
adds, ‘Who art thow that condemnest another 
man’s servant?’ I seize this opportunity to 
declare to all men desirous to hear it, that I 
believe firmly in the divinity of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, and that I adopt in every respect the 
Niczean Creed. I dare to affirm besides, that 
these sentiments are actually those of all the 
members of our Faculty, as they have always 
been those of our Churches, It seems to me 
that persons who know not Jesus Christ as 
‘God above all things, blessed eternally,’ are 
much to be pitied, and want the greatest of all 
consolations, This error appears the more dan- 
gerous, because it is generally followed by other 
errors; for the truths which are the objects of 
faith are so connected and riveted together, 
that it is impossible to discard one without 
shaking or overturning all the others. These 


truths form together a majestic edifice, to which 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 167 


all its parts are absolutely necessary, and which 
falls in ruins if a breach be made anywhere; 
and particularly, if the first stone removed be the 
keystone of the corner. But what would become 
of us all, if the erring, even when they err in 
good faith, had no hope of access to the throne 
of grace? Men who, as I do, feel how much they 
need God’s mercy, and man’s indulgence, feel 
little disposition to be severe toward others.” * 

In holding this language, M. Encontre was 
not merely performing, on his own account, 
an act of humility and of Christian charity; he 
was touching upon one of the supreme ques- 
tions which, in our days, are occasioning a crisis 
in Christendom; and he was indicating its true 
and its sole solution. Like all passions, (the best 
are not exempt,) the passion for the salvation 
of man’s soul is full of enthusiasm and full of 
blindness; it believes too readily in the possi- 
bility of attaining the object; it is too unscru- 


pulous and undiscriminating in the means. 


* Archives du Christianisme aux XIX¢ siécle, t. 1, pp. 63-66. 


168 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


Hence sprung religious tyranny and theological 
intolerance: the powerful thought they could 
compel the human soul to work out its own 
salvation; the learned believed they could de- 
fine the conditions of that salvation. Mistakes, 
both of them, profoundly antichristian! Just 
as no power of man has the right to strip any 
single soul, created by God free and responsi- 
ble, of its liberty of conscience; so, equally, no 
science of man can define the laws and the facts 
that shall regulate the future state of the soul. 
Liberty is, on this earth, the principle of the 
moral life of man; man’s state beyond this earth 
is a question between him and his Maker, and 
to be determined by the use which man may 
have here made of his liberty. To respect 
God’s gift of liberty to man, and the mystery 
of God’s decrees respecting man’s salvation, is in 
reality the law of Christians ; and it is only on 
this double condition that there really is either 
any awakening or any progress of Christians, 


Nothing does more honor to the memory of 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 169 


M. Daniel Encontre than to have been one of 
the first to understand and to fulfill this double 
duty. Firmly attached to those fundamental 
articles of belief which are Christianity itself, 
he was strange to every narrowness or exaggera- 
tion of doctrine, to every presumptuousness of 
opinion, and to every theological intolerance ; 
his piety was comprehensive, without there 
being any vagueness in his faith; his Chris- 
tianity was that of a Liberal; nor did his 
attainments as a mathematician indispose him 
to remain a Christian. 

Scarcely was M. Encontre dead, when two 
new men, both, like him, eminent as pastors 
and professors—M. Alexandre Vinet and M. 
Adolphe Monod—appeared on the religious 
arena, and gave more éclat to the Christian 
reaction by -using similar means, and by impel- 
ling the Protestant Church of France in the 
same direction. | 

Although he was born and continually 


lived and wrote in Switzerland, M. Alexandre 


170 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


Vinet was of French extraction; he belongs to 
France as much as to Switzerland, for he knew, 
and understood, and loved France as much as 
he did Switzerland. He served, too, the cause 
of religious liberty, and the Christian reaction, 
in France not less than in Switzerland. A deli- 
cate child, son of a poor and an austere school- 
master, who destined him to the obscure life of 
a village clergyman, he manifested from the 
commencement of his laborious career an ardent 
taste for literature and for study, which prom- 
ised him a rich reward in the intellectual en- 
joyment of the chef-d’ceuvres of ancient and 
modern literature. He was found upon one 
occasion in his little chamber in a fit of enthu- 
siasm and affected to tears by a perusal of the 
“Cid.” At the age of twenty he became Pro- 
fessor of French Literature at Bale; and there 
he devoted himself to the service of every can- 
didate upon the Rhine or upon the Swiss Alps 
who required to be taught to comprehend and 


admire the great writers of France of whatever 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 171 


age, and in whatever department of literature. 
Philosophers and orators, prose-writers and 
poets, Christians or Freethinkers, Catholics 
or Protestants, Conservatives or Reformers, 
Classicists or Romanticists—all the men who 
have constituted the intellectual and literary 
glory of France, obtained in this fervent Meth- 
odist of the Valdenses an admirer as warm as 
he was intelligent and impartial. The prevail- 
ing characteristic of M. Vinet’s literary essays 
and criticisms is their geniality; and wherever 
he encounters any spark or trace of the true or 
the beautiful, under whatever banner they ap- 
pear, and however they may be mingled with 
opinions otherwise shocking to his feelings, he 
is at once attracted and moved, and he admires 
and praises with enthusiasm. His was a mind 
of comprehensive sympathies, open to every 
impression, keen to appreciate, always ready to 
enjoy everything that deserved to give pleasure, 
even although it might be only momentarily 
and in passing. 


172 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


This passionate admirer of the beautiful, this 
critic, so liberal-minded and so impartial, was a 
sound and uncompromising moralist, as well as 
a pious and firm Christian. ‘The predominant 
idea of all his literary judgments is moral; and 
this determines the tone of his criticism, and 
the impression which it leaves behind it, with- 
out ever rendering it either harsh, or illiberal, 
or narrow-minded, In the sphere of positive 
belief, without importing into controversies be- 
tween believer and believer any microscopic 
criticism of detail, M. Vinet has never, upon 
the divine origin and the fundamental dogmas 
of Christianity, had the least hesitation, never 
made the smallest concession; he grapples 
directly with the most specious and the most 
popular objections of his adversaries, and com- 
bats them with a conviction the expression of 
which becomes more and more eloquent the 
clearer and the more complete its manifestation. 
“To attempt to distinguish morality from 
dogma,” he says, “is to attempt to distinguish a 


AWAKENING OF OHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 173 


river from its source. The Christian dogma is 
at its outset a morality, although a Christian 
one. Just as God, in the creed of Christianity, 
reveals himself under a form that nature did 
not announce, Christian morality, im its turn, 
invests itself with a character that nature would 
never have impressed upon it. Man finding 
his own inability to make himself a religion, 
God-came to aid him in his weakness. It is 
now rather more than eighteen centuries since, 
in an obscure corner of the world, there 
appeared a man. I do not say that a long 
series of prophets had announced the coming of 
that man; that a long series of miracles had 
marked with the seal of God the nation where 
he was to be born, and even the prophecy 
which foretold him; that, in a word, an im- 
posing mass of evidence surrounds and authen- 
ticates him. I say merely that that man 
preached a religion. ‘That religion is not nat- 
ural religion; the dogmas of the existence of 


God and of the soul’s immortality are every- 


174 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


where taken for granted in his discourses— 
never taught, never proved. Neither are the 
ideas which he teaches deduced. logically from 
the primitive axioms of reason; that which he 
teaches, that which forms the substance of his 
doctrine, embraces subjects which confound the 
reason, and to which the reason has neither way 
nor access; he preaches a God on earth, a God 
man, a God poor, a God crucified; he preaches 
wrath involving the innocent, mercy exempt- 
ing the guilty from all condemnation, God the 
victim of man, and man forming one person 
with God; he preaches a new birth, without 
which man can never be saved; he preaches 
the sovereignty of God’s grace, and the pleni- 
tude of the liberty of man. I do not in 
any way qualify his teaching; I give them to 
you as they are, and without disguise; I seek 
not to justify them. You may, if you please, 
feel surprise, you may take offense; scruple not 
to do so. But when you have to your heart’s 


content wondered at their strangeness, I on my 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 115 
side will propose to you another subject for 
your wonder. These strange dogmas conquered 
the world. In their very infancy they invaded 
learned Athens, rich Corinth, haughty Rome. 
They gathered together ‘Confessors’ from work- 
shops, from prisons, from schools, from the 
courts of justice, and from thrones. Conquerors 
of civilization, they triumphed over barbar- 
ism; they made to pass under the same yoke 
the degraded Roman, the savage Sicambrian. 
The forms of society have changed; society has 
been dissolved and moulded afresh. They alone 
have endured in their integrity. No other 
doctrine, whether of philosophy or of religion, 
lasted: each had its time; each time its idea; 
and, as a celebrated writer has said, the religious 
sentiment, abandoned to itself, chose for itself 
moulds in accordance with the time, which it 
broke when the time was no longer there. But 
the dogma of the Cross persisted in recurring. 
Had it only taken possession of a certain class 


of persons it would have been much, it would 


176 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


perhaps have been even inexplicable; but you 
find followers of the Cross in the camp and 
in civil life, among the rich and among the 
poor, among the bold and among the timid, 
among the learned and among the ignorant. 
This dogma is good for all, everywhere, always; 
it never grows old. The religion of the Cross 
appears nowhere in arrear of civilization; on 
the contrary, far as civilization may progress, it 
ever finds Christianity in advance. Suppose not 
that a complaisant Christianity will ever cancel 
any article or expunge any idea to accommodate 
itself to the age: no, it derives its strength 
from its inflexibility, and needs not make any 
surrender to be in harmony with what is beau- 
tiful, legitimate, true; for it 1s in itself the type 
of them all. Still it is not a religion which 
flatters man; and the worldly, by keeping aloof, 
show plainly enough that Christianity is a 
strange doctrine. Those who dare not reject it 
strive to render it palatable. They strip it of 
what offends them—of its myths, as they are 


+ 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 177 


pleased to style them; they almost make out of 
Christ’s doctrine a rationalism. But, singular 
to say, once a rationalism it has no longer any 
force; in this respect resembling one of the most 
marvelous creatures in the animate world, to 
which it is death to lose its sting. The strange 
dogmas disappear, but with them all zeal, fer. 
vor, sanctity, charity, disappear also; the salt 
of the earth has lost its savor, and we know 
not by what means to restore it. But, on the 
other hand, do you learn that somewhere or 
other there is an awakening of Christians, that 
Christianity is resuscitating, that faith shows 

signs of life, that zeal abounds? Ask not in — 
what soil these precious plants are springing ; 
youmay pronounce yourself: it is in the rude and 
rugged soil of orthodoxy, in the shade of the 
mysteries which confound human reason, and 
of which human reason would like so much to 
get rid.... Some passages in the fair work 
of M. Saint-Mare Girardin upon dramatic liter. 


ature might, at least I fear so, lead to the con- 
12 


1 78 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


clusion that Christianity is, in its essence, only 
the result of a natural progress of man’s mind, 
a gradual development of ancient wisdom. 
Such, for instance, is the passage where the 
author tells us that the Greeks were advancing 
step by step toward Christian spiritualism. 
We regret that M. Saint-Mare Girardin did not 
say in what sense he understood this, and with- 
in what limits. We hope that he will not see 
in us the champion of a captious orthodoxy, if 
we say that nothing so much weakens the au- 
thority of Christianity, that nothing prejudices 
in men’s minds its cause more, than to treat it 
as a link in the chain, which chain in reality it 
severed. That events, that is, Providence, did 
aforehand hollow a bed in the regions of the 
west for this divine river, what believer, how- 
ever rigid, would ever entertain any scruple in 
admitting? But still it is essential that we 
should not misapprehend the source whence 
that river welled forth. No natural develop- 


ment of events, either among the Jews or 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 179 


among the Greeks, can account for the exist- 
ence of Christianity. Whatever the progress 
made by the ancients, there never was a time 
when there existed not an infinity between 
their ideas, and the ideas of Christianity ; and 
infinity alone can fill up the gulf between. 
There is an end of Christianity if men agree 
in thinking the contrary—if they succeed in 
causing the Supernatural to assume a place in 
one of the compartments of the Philosophy of 
History. As far as we are concerned, we would 
prefer for the Christian religion the most out- 
rageous denial, to an admiration circumscribed 
within such limits, Christ’s faith is nothing 
if not, like Melchisedek without earthly parent 
here below, and without genealogy.” * 
Whoever indicated with greater distinctness 
the keystone in the edifice of Christianity, or 


ever clung to it more closely? M. Vinet occu- 


*Essai sur la manifestation des convictions religieuses, p. 85. 
Premiers discours, pp. 14, 50, 58. Littérature Frangaise, vol. 
iii, p. 623. 


180 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


pied himself in turn with freedom of conscience 
and of man’s thought, with the faith of Christ, 
and with the literature of France. These three 
subjects became the passions of his life, stirring 
his soul, though at unequal depths. But of 
these three only one, the passion for literature, 
was a source to him of tranquil and unmiti- 
gated enjoyment. In his advocacy of man’s 
liberty and of Christianity, M. Vinet had to 
pass not only through the ordeal of intellectual 
labors and combats, but through the solicitudes 
and sorrows of life. The defender of the liberty 
of forms of worship, crowned as such by the 
“Société Frangais de la Morale Chrétienne,” lived 
to see this liberty attacked in his native Switzer. 
land, at once by popular fury and by civil au- 
thority. The fervent promoter of the Christian 
reaction beheld one hundred and sixty evangel- 
ical pastors of the Canton of the Vaud, his com- 
panions in this pious work, forced to quit their 
“Chairs” in order to preserve their faith, And 


it was in sickness, and at the approach of death, 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 181 


that M. Vinet had to undergo all this. Neither 
his faith nor the tranquillity of his soul was 
disturbed. He continued, to his last hour, to 
be the active champion of liberty, the faithful 
servant of Christ, the eloquent admirer and 
commentator upon French literature, which he 
followed in all its phases, whether calm or 
stormy, whether pure or defiled. “After all,” 
so he wrote in 1845, “I am not one of those 
who despair; God, without any violence to our 
freedom of action, rather by that freedom itself, 
conducts us to the unknown shores. The ports 
at which we land do not all of them afford | 
secure mooring; we know something of that 
even in this little country. Our progress will 
be slow, and amid storms; but the circle of uni- 
versal truth will be completed, and man’s sense 
of moral right and wrong will be improved, at 
the same time that man’s science will be enriched. 
I should feel horror if I thought that Some 
One is not at the center of all this movement, 


_ holding all its elements in his hand; Some 


182 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


One to whom, whether they know him or do 
not know him, the aspirations of all creatures 
ascend in their sorrow, and whom they instinct- 
ively salute with the sweet reassuring name of 
‘Father, ” * ) 

Upon a single point, the relations of Church 
and State, his usual comprehensiveness of view 
and independence of thought appeared to 
abandon M. Vinet. Justly struck and afilicted 
by his own experience of the inconveniences of 
a strict bond between Church and State, dis- 


* Notice sur M. Alexandre Vinet, par M. E. Souvestre, pub- 
lished in the Magazin Pittoresque de 1848, p. 81. 

The principal works of M. Alexandre Vinet are: 

1. Traité et Polémique sur la liberté des cultes, 1826, 1852. 

2. Discours sur quelques sujets religieux. 1831, 1853. 

3. Essais de philosophie et de morale religieuse. 1837. 

4, Essai sur la manifestation des convictions religieuses, et sur 
la séparation de l’figlise et de Etat. 1842, 1858. 

5. Etudes et méditations évangéliques. 1847, 1849, 1851. 

6. Etudes sur Pascal. 1848, 1856. 

7. Chrestomathie Frangaise, Histoire de la littérature Fran- 
gaise au XVIII siécle, et Etudes sur la littérature Frangaise au 
XIX® siécle. 1829, 1849, 1853, etc. 

He wrote, besides, numerous short pieces, and articles in re- 
views and journals, suggested by topics of the day. 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 183 


gusted at the servility and falsity which fre- 
quently are, sometimes on the part of the State, 
sometimes on the part of the Church, its results» 
he concluded that in all cases all alliance be- 
tween the two conditions of society is radically 
vicious; and he declared their entire separation 
a general and absolute principle, the sole reason- 
able and just system, the sole efficacious guar- 
antee of truth and of liberty in spirituals or 
temporals. He thus ignored, it appears to me, 
the natural causes which produce, and the 
human motives which sanction, a certain alliance 
between societies civil and ecclesiastical; he 
ignored also the inestimable advantages which, 
at certain times and in certain circumstances, 
each may derive, and has actually derived, from 
that alliance. In the United States of America, 
the entire separation of the State and of the 
different Churches was necessary and salutary, 
for it was the spontaneous consequence of the 
condition of men’s minds, and of the position of 


society. In England, in spite of the acts of 


184 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


injustice, and the ills engendered by the inti- 
mate union of the state with a Church legally 
constituted and having exclusive privileges, the 
coexistence of the Church of England with 
the freedom, more and more every day complete 
and recognized, of the Churches of the Dis. 
senters, was for the Christian religion a potent 
principle of life, of force, and of durability. 

And if we go back to the ancient history of 
Europe, who can doubt that at the fall of the 
Roman Empire, if the State and the Church 
had not, although distinct institutions, been 
allied, the development of Christianity would 
have been far less energetic, and its conquest of 
its barbarous conquerors far more problemat- 
ical? This is, I repeat, a question not of prin- 
ciple, but of time, of place, of circumstance, and 
of condition of society. .A complete separation 
of Church and State may be good and prac. 
ticable; it is neither the only good system, nor 
is it always a practicable system. 


An alliance of the two upon certain fixed 


+ 


oe 


- 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 185 


terms has its inconveniences and its perils, but 
its effects may be also very salutary; it may be 
essential, and does not of necessity exclude reli- 
gious sincerity or religious liberty. M. Vinet, 
in discussing the subject, lost sight of the 
general history of human societies, and attached 
too much importance to the specious and tran- 
sient facts which he had before his eyes. 

If M. Vinet were now living, he might in 
his own country behold two fair examples of 
the good results of the mixed systems which he 
so absolutely condemned. In the Cantons of 
the Vaud and of Geneva, after the violent and 
painful contests to which I have above referred, 
a dissenting Independent Church was estab- 
lished by the side of a Church recognized and 
supported by the State. In neither canton 
was this establishment a temporary expedient, 
the fruit of a momentary ardor; the Independ- 
ent Church has consolidated and developed it- 
self; it endures and prospers. Like the Estab- 


lishment, it has its pastors, its churches, its 


= 


* 


186 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


solemnities, its schools for general and for 
superior instruction. I have before me facts 
and figures which prove its vitality and its prog- 
ress. And not only did the Established Church 
finally acquiesce in the peaceable existence 
of the Independent Church, it also profited by 
it, and its salutary influence has been frankly 
acknowledged by its worthiest pastors, In 
Switzerland, as in England, Scotland, and Hol- 
land, and in our days more easily and more 
promptly than in ancient times, the existence 
on the one side of a national Church recognized 
by the State, has given to the different forms 
of Christian belief a stability and a dignity 
which have secured its permanent effects upon 
succeeding generations; the existence, on the 
other side, of independent Churches, and the 
religious emulation between the two establish- 
ments, have turned in both to the profit of faith 
and of piety. 

M. Adolphe Monod seemed, even more than 
M. Vinet, to promise by natural bent of hig 


* ”~ 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 187 


character, and by the incidents of his life, to 
become the champion of an entire separation of 
Church and State. At the very commencement 
of his career, he suffered from a Government 
based upon their connection. Pastor at Lyons, 
in 1831, of the established Protestant Church, 
he was dismissed from these functions by the 
Consistory of that city, as too exacting in his 
orthodoxy, and as troubling by his exigencies 
the peace of his Church. He then became the 
founder and pastor of a small dissenting and in- 
dependent Church at Lyons. The energy with 
which he expressed his convictions, and the ex- 
cellence of his preaching, rapidly spread, and - 
increased his renown for piety. Numerous 
Protestants manifested the desire to see him 
once more within the pale of the national 
Church. He made no objection; a Chair be- 
coming vacant in the Faculty of Montauban, 
M. Adolphe Monod was nominated, and from 
1836 to 1847 he both lectured and preached at 
Montauban with a commanding ability that 


* 


- 188 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANORE. 


™ 


made itself felt, not only among the majority 
of the students, but propagated its influences 
to a distance among the principal centers of 
French Protestantism. In 1847 he was sum- 
moned to Paris as the suffragan of another 
pastor, M. Juillerat. Nor did he scruple to 
accept this secondary and precarious situation. 
He had full confidence in the divine vocation, 
and was firmly resolved to proceed to any place 
where the faith of Christ might demand his 
services. He had, in the evangelical chair, 
even more success at Paris than at Lyons and 
Montauban. When, after the Revolution of 
1848, a general assembly of the Reformed 
Churches of France assembled for the purposes 
of considering their institutions and discussing 
points of common interest, a grave question was 
raised, and became the subject of warm and 
lengthened debate: Should French Protestants 
proclaim their ancient Confession of Faith, that 
of Rochelle, or should they proclaim a confession 


of new articles; or lastly, should they remain 


A 
* 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 189 
passive and do nothing? some, and particularly 
their pastor, M. Frederic Monod, elder brother 
of M. Adolphe Monod, announced their determ- 
ination to retire from the assembly and from 
the established Church, unless they adopted a 
Confession of Faith in accordance with the tra- 
ditional principles of the Reformation. The 
inertness of the hesitating and timid assembly 
was equivalant to a refusal, and they did m 
effect retire. To the great surprise and great 
regret of his adversaries, M. Adolphe Monod, 
although favorable to the principles of the Con- 
fession of Faith, did not follow the example by 
retiring; he even succeeded his brother as 
titular pastor in the Church of Paris, and pub- 
lished to the world the motives of his conduct.* 

His motives were good, such as a man of 
elevated character and energetic purpose might 
conceive and might avow. In spite of their 
importance, the questions which concern the 


* Tn his work entitled, Pourquoi je demeure dans VEglise 
établie. 


190 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


organization of the Church and its eternal rela- 
tions were, in the eyes of M. Adolphe Monod, 
only secondary considerations, subject in a cer- 
tain measure to time and to circumstance. For 
him the question of faith was supreme; and he 
occupied himself infinitely more with the spirit- 
ual state of souls than with ecclesiastical gov- 
ernment. To the serious thinker the Christian 
faith is quite different from any conception or 
conviction of the understanding; it is a general 
condition of the whole man; it is the very life 
of the soul; not merely its actual life, but the 
source and the guarantee of its future life. The 
faith in Christ Jesus, the Redeemer, the Saviour, 
makes the life of a Christian; and the life of a 
Christian is a preparation for an eternal sal- 
vation. With this faith penetrating to his very 
marrow, and with the intimate persuasion of its 
consequences, the duty of giving a voice to 
that faith, and of diffusing it, was the dominant 
idea, the permanent passion, of M. Adolphe 
Monod. He had not himself been always firmly 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 191 


settled in his religious convictions; he had been 
a prey to great moral perplexities, and to at- 
tacks of profound melancholy. When he had 
escaped from these—or rather, to use his own 
words, “when God had become really the 
master of his heart”—he had no other thought 
but that of bringing other souls to the same 
state, and of rousing them to a faith in Christ, 
with a view to their eternal salvation, The 
position which he regarded as of all the most 
appropriate for himself, was one in which he 
could most profitably forward this work. When 
in 1848 the question was thus put to him, and 
when he had been convinced both by his past 
observation of the Protestant Church of France 
during the last twenty years, and by his own 
experience of it, that the established Church 
offered to him in his Christian purpose the 
vastest field of exertion, and the best chance of 
success, he did not hesitate to remain init. “I 
find in the situation,” he said, “ grave disorders, 


of which it is my duty to seek unceasingly the 


192 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


reform; but that situation has also its hopeful 
side. A long development of my ideas would 
be superfluous; let us confine ourselves to 
some striking facts. Try and reckon how many 
orthodox pastors our Church possessed when 
the reaction began in 1819, and then make a 
similar calculation for 1849. I do not mean to 
fix the precise numbers; but is it too much to 
say, that im the course of a single generation 
the number of orthodox pastors is ten, fifteen, 
twenty times perhaps as great? This applies to 
the clergy, of whom everywhere the immense 
influence is felt. Among their congregations it 
is less easy to follows things; but the attentive 
observer does not fail to mark similar indi- 
cations. Behold our religious societies: are not 
the most popular among them those which 
hoisted most manfully the colors of orthodoxy ? 
And if some are in a languishing condition, is it 
not because they offered in this respect fewest: 
guarantees? Evidently the first condition of 


existence for our religious institutions of char- 


. @ 
AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 193 


ity is sound doctrine. My readers, permit me 
to question you still more closely. Throw your 
eyes upon the eight or ten families best known 
to you, beginning with your own, and compare 
what they are now with what they were in 
1819; contrast their occupations, tastes, sacri- 
fices, and intercourse, the modes of education, 
the books read, friendships formed, and so on; 
and then declare, thankless ones, if God has 
allowed you to be without encouragement.” * 

M. Adolphe Monod had good reason to draw 
attention to this general progress of Christianity ; 
but there was another progress also deserving 
notice, that which he had himself made, and 
which he was making more and more every day, 
in the attainment of the true and distinguishing 
character of a Christian. 

At the commencement of his career as a 
minister of the Gospel, in his different contro- 
versies, and especially in his controversy with 


* Pourquoi je demeure dans VEglise établie, par M, Adolphe 


Monod, pp. 25-82. Paris, 1849. 
13 


= 
194 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


the Consistory of Lyons, he had shown rude- 
ness, impatience, and want of foresight; he 
had been too precipitate in enforcing his faith 
by arguments, and too much disposed to under- 
value the obstacles in its way. Thanks to his 
genuine sincerity and the natural elevation of 
his character, time, experience, and success had 
given at once breadth and suppleness to his 
thought. Faith had generated modesty, and 
hope patience. Contrary to the ordinary bias ~ 
of men, his liberalism had increased in the same 
measure as his strength. As an act of duty he 
made in 1848 an avowal of the state of his 
mind in this respect. “The age,” he said, “ re- 
proaches us with ‘exclusesme, (exclusiveness, ) 
a new word expressly invented to denote its | 
favorite charge; for false ideas the age has 
only the resource of a barbarous phraseology. 
This ‘exclusisme’ is the sole thing which the 
age cannot tolerate in matters of doctrine: it is 
prepared, it says to itself, to take everything 


within its pale except the ‘exclusives.’ Thus 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 195 


they demand from us only one change in the 
profession of our faith; they call upon us to 
substitute for our usual prefatory formula, ‘This 
is the truth, the words, ‘'This is my opinion,’ 
And if they, in claiming such qualification of 
language, limited their demand to things which, 
in spite of any relative importance, do not con- 
stitute the substance of the faith and of the life 
of a Christian, we should do what they require; 
perhaps I should rather say, we do it already, 
as brother should do to brother, and in the in- 
terest of truth itself. It is one of the distinctive 
features of the awakening of Christians in our 
epoch, that charitably sparing in the absolute 
dogmatism of which the sixteenth century was 
prodigal, they make dogmas of only a small 
number of fundamental doctrines. And even 
of these they strive to contract the circle, until 
having reached the vital forces, the very heart, 
so to say, of truth, they sum it up in one single 
name, Jesus Christ, and in one single word, 


grace. Whoever is of that faith, whatever 


196 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


name he bears elsewhere, and whatever place 
he occupies in the Universal Church—Lutheran, 
Anglican, Methodist, Moravian, Baptist, nay, 
Roman Catholic, or Greek Catholic, we receive 
that man as a brother in Christ Jesus; and not 
we only, but the whole contemporary Evan- 
gelical Church, with certain exceptions becoming 
every day rarer, and arising from a narrow or 
sectarian pietism. Hence the ‘Evangelical Al- 
liance, formed in our own time of more than 
twenty Protestant denominations, the prelude 
only to another evangelical alliance which will 
exclude none who rely upon the sole merits of 
Jesus Christ, the Saviour and Lord of all. 

“Our ‘ exclusisme, besides, has not for its ob- 
jects individuals but doctrines. Absolute affirm. 
ation is legitimate when the object is to define 
the faith, which is the promise of salvation, for 
God has clearly revealed it in his word; but 
when the object is to mark the individuals who 
possess that saving faith, similar affirmation 


could not be used without temerity; for God 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANOE. 197 


has nowhere revealed to us either the internal 
state of any man, or the final lot reserved for 
him. We exclude no man, we judge no man, 
alive or dead; the judgment of the quick and 
of the dead belongs to God alone. Doubtless 
we estimate, according to our ability, the spiritual 
condition of a man by his works, as we do a . 
tree by its fruits; Jesus himself invites us to do 
s0. Doubtless, when we see a man living and 
dying in the works of the faith, we hope for 
him, and our hope may grow even to a firm as- 
surance; and when, on the contrary, we see a 
man living and dying in the works of incredu- 
lity, we have a feeling of anxiety for him—a 
feeling as painful as it is mysterious. But, after 
all, neither in the first case nor in the second, 
and still less in the second than the first, are we 
authorized to pronounce any personal judgment; 
and but for the paradoxical turn of the expres. 
sion, I would willingly adopt the language 
of the devout Bunyan: Three things would 


astonish me in heaven; first, not to see there 


198 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


certain persons whom I expect to see there; 
secondly, to see there those I do not expect to 
see there; and thirdly, which would surprise 
me most, to see myself there.’” * | 

A piety so profound, and at the same time so 
modest and so large, expressed with an elo- 
quence which combined an impassioned earnest- 
ness of language with an impassioned earnest- 
ness of conviction, could not fail to exercise 
great influence. As a preacher, M. Adolphe 
Monod was powerful. He had acquired, not 
by careful and cold observation, but by an 


* Sermon sur l’Exclusisme, ou l’unité de la foi, in the 
Recueil des Sermons de M. Adolphe Monod. 38me série, t. ii, pp. 
386-390. Paris, 1860. The sermons of M. Adolphe Monod 
have been collected and published in four vols. 8vo. Paris, 
1856-1860. He also wrote several small works, among others: 

1. Lucile, ou la lecture de la Bible. 1841. 

2. La Destitution d’Adolphe Monod, récit inédit, rédigé par 
luiméme, 1864. 

3. Récit des conférences qui ont eu lieu en 1834, entre 
quelques Catholiques Romains et M. Adolphe Monod. Paris, 
1860. 


4, Les adieux d’Adolphe Monod & ses amis et A Véglise. 
Paris, 1856. 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 199 


assiduous and conscientious study of the Gos- 
pels and of himself, a remarkable knowledge of 
human nature, of its strength and of its weak- 
ness, of its deficiencies and of its aspirations. 
He laid siege, so to speak, to the souls of men, 
and he pressed the siege ardently and with 
skill; he assailed all their gates, and pursued 
them to their innermost defenses, keeping con- 
stantly displayed the banner of Christ, and 
inspiring them with the perfect confidence that 
he was urging them to take their stand, too, 
beneath it, not from any human motive, or any 
desire of glory to himself, but from a serious 
desire for their souls’ welfare, and from it alone. 
Thus did he gain over to his Divine Master the 
hearts disposed to receive him, strongly shake 
the purpose of those not confirmed in their 
rebellion, and leave astonished and intimidated 
those whom he did not bring over. As pastor 
also his influence was extraordinary; his life 
was the reflection and the commentary upon 


his preaching. He applied first to his own 


200 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


case the precepts of his faith, and the con. 
clusions therefrom logically deducible. As he 
said nothing that he did not think, so he thought 
nothing that he did not practice; and without 
being readily impressionable, like that of M. 
Vinet, his zeal was expansive, and his piety 
gave him no rest from the task of diffusing by 
example and precept the faith and the practice 
of Christianity. Attacked by a painful and 
incurable illness, which at last condemned him 
to immobility, he did not suffer it to render him 
inactive and useless. Every Sunday during the 
last six months of his life, his family, some 
pastors his colleagues, and as many attached 
friends as his chamber could receive, gathered 
around his bed, and his zeal surmounted his pain. 
He addressed to them, to use his very words, 
“sometimes the regret of a dying man, some- 
times the results of his own experiences of faith 
and of life.” The devout assemblage was again 
convoked, at his expressed wish, for the 6th 
April, 1856. But that day, before the hour 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 201 


fixed for the assembly had arrived, God took to 
him his servant, granting the wish expressed 
in his own often repeated prayer, “Let my life 
only terminate with my ministry, and my min- 
istry only with my life.” * 

Eighteen months before the decease of M. 
Adolphe Monod, an eminent pastor of the 
Lutheran Church of Paris, his friend and fellow- 
laborer in the work of Christianity, M. Edouard 
Verny, died suddenly in the Evangelical Chair 
at Strasbourg, while preaching upon the 
words addressed by the Apostles to the Chris- 
tians of Antioch, “Tt seemed good to the Holy 
Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater 
burden than these necessary things,” words not 
less liberal than pious, and faithfully express- 
ing the sentiments of the Christian orator, who 
died while commenting upon them. The mind 
of M. Verny was naturally liberal and independ- 


* These are the words inserted in a publication bearing the 
title “ Les adieux d’Adolphe Monod & sa famille et 4 D’église,” 
in which the last exhortations and conversations of this dying 
Christian have been piously collected. P. viii. Paris, 1856. 


202 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


ent; his intellectual career had commenced 
with philosophical studies, and he had retained 
a strong bias in favor of the progress of thought. 
This did not, however, prevent him from 
promptly and calmly appreciating the opinions 
which he did not share. Without possessing 
either the impassioned style or the power of 
M. Adolphe Monod, he was not less devoted to 
the cause of Christianity; and he convinced 
those by the charms of his manner, into whose 
minds M. Monod entered by force and as a 


conqueror. * 


* Although M. Verny had long preached, and had often 
written in religious reviews and journals, and particularly in 
the “Semeur,” very few monuments remain of his ideas and of 
his talents, The principal are : 

1, A sermon “Upon the Unity of the Church,” preached in 
the church of Bolbec in 1854. 

2. Two sermons, one “ Upon the Prayer of the Canaanite 
Woman ;” the other “ Upon Repentance ;” preached at Paris in 
1843 and 1846. 

3. The sermon “Sur Ouverture solennelle de la session du 
Consistoire supérieur de l’Eglise de la Confession d’Augs- 
bourg,” preached at Strasbourg on the 19th of October, 1854: 
while preaching which M. Verny died in the pulpit. 

4, An “Essai sur les droits de la science,” inserted in the 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 203 


Although the Protestant Church of France 
thereby sustained an immense loss, it had a 
striking and salutary spectacle also presented to 
it by the end of these two servants of Christ, 
the one dying suddenly, in the plenitude of his 
strength, at the very moment when from his 
pulpit he was maintaining with distinguished 
ability the doctrmes of his Master ; the other, 
from his bed, gathermg with pain what of 
breath remained to him in this world, to pour 
once more a flood of faith into the souls of his 
auditors. 

Such lives, such deaths, could not remain 
sterile of result; under their influence the Chris- 
tian faith was relumed; it again spread itself 
among the Protestants of France. Nor was 
this that arid cold faith which men accept to 
acquit their consciences, and to rid themselves 
“Reyue de Théologie et de Philosophie Chrétienne,” published 
at Strasbourg by M. Colani. Vol. ix, pp. 208-248, 1854. 
This essay was to have been followed by an “Essai sur les 


devoirs de la foi,” of which the sudden death of M. Verny 
prevented the completion. 


&. 

204 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 

of a trouble and a scruple; nor that vague and 
dreamy faith which feasts rather upon its own 
emotions, than nourishes itself with the truths 
which are the voice of God. A Christian’s 
faith is neither an act of prudent submission 
hor a paroxysm of mystic fervor. Conviction 
and sentiment, the firm adhesion of the mind, 
and the filial love of the heart, meet in that 
faith in essential and intimate union. It is the 
light coming from on high, and bringing down 
with it the genial principles of vital warmth 
and fecundity; out of which, like salubrious 
waters from a pure source, flow freely and in 
abundance the works of human charity. I have 
lying before me a list of the different charities 
to which Christianity has in our own days since 
the reaction given birth in the Protestant 


Church of France. * 
I see there manifold associations, enterprises 
* Exposé des ceuvres de la charité protestante en France, par 


H. de Triqueti, membre du conseil presbytéral et du diaconat 
de l'Eglise réformée de Paris. 18mo. 1863, 


* 
* 
AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 205 


supposing a long duration of existence, unremit- 
ting efforts for the moral development of men; 
for the bodily solace of their earthly condition ; 
for the propagation and the defense of freedom 
of opinion in religious matters; for the support 
and diffusion of the faith itself: all these objects, 
at once so various and so analogous, are being 
laboriously worked out both by the independ- 
ent Protestant Churches, and by the Protestant 
Church established from the State. M. Edmond 
de Pressensé and M. Eugéne Bersier devote 
their talents and their zeal to the same forms 
of Christian belief as were advocated by M. 
Alexandre Vinet and M. Adolphe Monod. In 
spite of the free divergence of sentiment and 
the diversity of ecclesiastical government in 
French Protestantism, we may observe in its 
bosom a progress of Christian Faith, a progress 
in works of Christian Charity, a progress in 
Christian Science, and a progress in Christian 
Influence. I use the same terms employed by 


me in speaking of the contemporary Catholic 


206 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 
4 


Church of Rome, because I find before me 
similar facts. These facts do not announce the 
reconciliation of the two Churches—profound 
differences of opinion continue to separate 
them; but these facts are, in both Churches, 
signs of the Awakening of Christianity. 


Il. AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


Bor the world has not changed since God at 
its creation delivered it up to the disputes of 
mankind; nor have the diversity and conflict of 
ideas and of passions ever ceased to be the con- 
dition of humanity. By the side of the move- 
ment of Christianity to which I refer, a move- 
ment in the contrary direction is manifesting 
itself, and is pursuing its course. Christianity 
at its Awakening is challenged to ruder com- 
bats. Philosophy refuses to its fundamental 
dogmas the marks and the rights of rational 


truth. An erudite criticism contests its histor- 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 207 
- 


ical evidence. The natural sciences proclaim 
that they do not require its aid to account for 
man and for the world. It is affirmed as a 
principle, and maintained in learned societies, 
that morality is entirely independent of religion. 
Man in his aspirations for liberty, that generous 
passion of the age, retains a profound resent- 
ment for the chains and the sufferings which, 
under pretext of Christianity, human conscience 
and human thought have so long been made to 
endure. T he influence of these bitter reminis- 
cences is manifesting itself in the different 
Christian Churches under various forms, and 
with different effects. Many liberals so dread 
the prospect of the Church of Rome obtaining 
power over civil society that they hardly ac. 
cord to this Church the rights of -common 
liberty; or, if they do so at all, they do it 
reluctantly and little by little. 

Among the Protestants, some push the pre- 
tensions of liberty so far as to insist that in re- 


ligious society a community of faith should 


208 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANOR. 


count for nothing; that a man should be enti- 
tled to remain a member of a Church, and even 
to remain its minister, although he profess 
respecting the essential facts and dogmas of the 
Church the most contradictory opinions, and 
opinions the strangest to its traditions and its 
texts. With respect to Roman Catholics, the 
dominant question is that of liberty. Are the 
liberties of civil society to be accorded to the 
Church? Are those of the Church to be allowed 
to remain intact in the bosom of the State? In 
Protestantism, on the other hand, the complete 
liberty of religion in the midst of civil society, 
the right of every individual to avow his belief, 
and to solemnize his own forms of worship— 
these are all privileges already acquired, and 
contested as little by any orthodox believer as 
by any freethinker. The questions really here 
agitated are questions of faith and of discipline. 
Are a common faith and a uniform internal 
discipline essential to the Church? Here is the 


debate. But above all these special questions 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 209 


and these different situations of the various 
Christian Churches rise, for Romanist and Prot- 
estant alike, the general question and the com- 
mon situation; it is Christianity itself which 
is engaged in the contest, and its awakening 
spirit confronts the antichristian movement. 

Let us not delude ourselves as to the charac- 
ter, the force, or the danger of this antichris- 
tian movement. It is not merely a feverish ex- 
citability in men’s minds, a simple revolutionary 
crisis in the religious order. No; we have here 
earnest convictions at work, and the prospect 
of a long war. Impatience of an ancient yoke, 
a spirit of reaction, a love of innovation, frivo- 
lous instincts not a few, as well as evil impulses, 
may claim a share—and a large share—in the 
attacks of which Christianity is in these days 
the object; but what gives to these attacks 
their most formidable character is a sentiment 
far more serious, one that has made heroes and 
martyrs, the love of truth at all risk and in 


despite of consequence, for the sake of truth 
14 


910 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 
v 


and for its sake alone. The feeling that makes 
man thirst for truth is an honor to human 
nature. If he fancies that he has found that 
truth, man abandons himself with transport to 
the satisfaction of his cravings, and does not 
scruple to drink even to intoxication at this 
pure source. But here he is incurring a great 
danger: man is not merely an intelligence 
whose vocation during his brief transit through 
this world confines him only to study and 
science: he is an active, responsible being; a — 
being engaged in a life full of labors, with a 
future life before him full of mystery; a laborer 
in a career having a particular interest for him- 
self, and yet forming part of a general scheme, 
of the design of which he has but imperfect 
glimpses. Very incomplete and very imperfect 
is that man’s state of intellectual action, who re- 
stricts himself to that which appears to him to 
be scientific truth, who does not, at the same 
time, submit his thought to all the tests to 


which he is himself subject, and who does not 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 211 


examine whether that thought be in harmony 
with the laws of his nature—whether it respect 
or transgress the limits imposed upon his 
means of knowledge. The danger of falling 
into error becomes greater in proportion as this 
incomplete and imperfect state of his mind is 
in itself'a noble state, a state that satisfies noble 
impulses, and procures noble means of enjoy- 
ment. ‘The most eminent among the actual ad. 
versaries of Christianity believe themselves the 
interpreters and the defenders of truth; some 
of philosophical truth; others of historical 
truth, others again of the truth of the facts and 
laws of the physical world. They are all proud 
of belonging to the department of pure science, 
and of making of scientific truth the sole object, 
the sole rule of their labors; but they are also — 
all forgetful of some conditions—nay, the most 
indispensable ones—to which science is bound 
to conform; some tests—and the most legit- 
imate ones—to which science is obliged to 


submit. 


912 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


They claim, too, the honor of bearing the 
banner of a grand and noble cause, the cause 
of Liberty. That Christianity alone restored to 
man, as man, and for no other reason, his 
rights to liberty, is a fact that the comparative 
histories of the world, whether Christian or 
Pagan, place beyond all doubt; for confront 
these two histories, and name the nations 
among whom the idea of the dignity of man’s 
liberty became a general idea, powerful in in- 
fluence and fruitful in consequence! Another 
fact equally historic and certain is, that Chris- 
tianity knew how to adapt itself, and did 
readily adapt itself, to the different states of 
society, and the different forms of government ; 
that it set itself up and maintained its rank in 
- republics as well as monarchies, under constitu- 
tional régimes as well as in despotisms, in the 
midst of democratical as well as aristocratical 
institutions; and, beyond doubt, it was not in 
free states that it displayed least vigor, or met 


with the smallest success. These two great 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 213 


facts are nowadays lost sight of. Christianity 
is accused of being hostile to Liberty and in- 
compatible with the spirit of modern societies ; 
and this is, indeed, the chief charge laid to 
its score. True it is, that the charge is not with- 
out deriving countenance from the history of 
Europe in modern times; worldly interests, 
selfish passions, events complex and obscure, in 
which moral order and social order have been 
compromised, have as it were suspended in cer- 
tain countries the liberal action of Christianity, 
and enlisted momentarily the cause of Liberty 
under a banner not Christian. The error is 
profound, but transient; the traditional infiu- 
ences of ages will resume their empire, the 
grand events their course; Christ’s religion and 
man’s liberty will once more remember that 
each stands in need of the other, and that their 
alliance in the bosom of order is their natural 
and necessary condition. That they do mis- 
understand each other occasions the most serious 


crisis at this moment in modern society. 


914 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE, 


Here, too, is the gravest peril which the 
Christian religion has in our days to surmount. 
Appreciate the force of the two sentiments to 
which I just now referred, the love of science 
and the love of liberty; understand through 
what phases of degeneration and of deceptive 
transformation those sentiments may, in the 
ardor of pursuit and of combat, have to pass; 
reckon up, if reckon you can, all the false ideas, 
the chimerical hopes, which they may suggest ; 
and then add to the amount, and as their con- 
sequences, the immoral and anarchical passions 
which may make those sentiments their pretext 
and their tools; and in doing this, you will 
find that you have passed in review the forces 
of that enemy now waging an implacable war 
against Christianity, although a war to which 
Christianity is called upon to put an end. 

I do not in any respect underrate the forces 
of that army. I disparage no more their qual- 
ity than their numbers. To maintain the com- 


bat worthily and efficaciously we should, at the 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 215 


onset, accord to our adversaries the whole 
amount of their merits as well as of their 
strength, and then attack them in their strong- 
est entrenchments. I have charged the enemies 
of Christianity with puerile presumptousness 
when they refuse to see the energy and the 
progress of the awakening of Christianity. It 
is of infinite importance to Christians, on their 
side, not to be blind to the ardor and the 
effects which that Antichristian demonstration 
is producing, of which their Faith and their 
Church are the aim. I am firmly convinced 
that in this war Christianity will conquer; but 
it will leave its enemies with arms still in their 
hands. It will no more gain over them any 
complete or definitive victory than it will be 
able to conclude with them any serious or dur- 
able peace. In the actual state of men’s minds 
and of society, the struggle will go on between 
the followers and the opponents of Christianity ; 
the two armies will continue to deploy their forces 


in the face each of the other; and that of the 


216 AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 


Christians, in order to defend and to extend its 
domain, will be incessantly called upon to watch 
and to combat the movements of its enemy. 
While combating them it will be also obliged 
to comply with the terms that truth exacts, 
and the conditions that liberty imposes. From 
these exigencies and these conditions Chris- 
tianity has nothing to dread—that is, if it accepts 
them boldly, and in its turn imposes them upon 
its enemies. Let man’s science, labors, and 
systems be submitted to the same tests, and 
handled with the same freedom of examination, 
as are being applied to the foundations and the 
doctrines of Christian faith; this is all that 
Christians are entitled to, all that they need to 
_ demand. | | 

Thus far I have explained the actual state of 
the Christian religion in France, the sources of 
its strength and of its weakness, its awakening 
and its perils. It is my intention now to ex- 
amine the actual state of those doctrines and 


systems which repudiate, or which more or less 


AWAKENING OF CHRISTIANITY IN FRANCE. 217 


deny and combat Christianity. When I have 
passed the hostile army in review, I will once 
more confront Christianity with its adversaries, 
and endeavor to distinguish, by contrasting them, 
on which side the truth is, on which side the 
right, and on which side the hope of future 


SUCCESS. 


SECOND MEDITATION. 


SPIRITUALISM. 


I wrrvxssepD the birth—not, certainly, the birth 
of Spiritualism, for this was, like its twin brother 
Materialism, born in the cradle of Philosophy, 
and while the steps of Philosophy were still those 
of an infant—but the birth of the spiritualistic 
school of the nineteenth century. This birth 
was a national reaction against the Sensualism 
of the eighteenth century—just as the Christian 
Awakening was a reaction against the impiety 
of the same epoch. Theories do not escape the 
influence of events: after the ideas come the 
facts, to pour upon those ideas floods of light, 
and to reveal the vices, whether of philosophy 
or of policy, in all their practical consequences. 


The Sensualism—that is to say, to style it by its 


SPIRITUALISM. 219 


true name, the Materialism—of the eighteenth 
century, did not pass triumphantly through this 
test: it still reigned in France at the commence- 
ment of the nineteenth century, but it was the 
reign of an antiquated sovereign in decline—a 
sovereign of whom the public know the defects, 
and whose successor is at hand. 

M. Royer-Collard was the first who had the 
merit and the honor of bringing back Spiritual- 
ism into the teaching of philosophy and into 
the minds of the people; his was a return sim- 
ply to the spiritualistic doctrmes of the seven- 
teenth century; but still a real progress, effected 
by a novel route, and a really scientific method. 
M. Royer-Collard was neither a philosopher by 
profession nor the disciple of any master, nor 
was his mind a mind disposed to take up with 
systems—he observed, he read, he studied and 
reflected, as a looker on, and an earnest judge 
of the world and of men. In philosophy and 
his professional chair, as later im politics and in 


the chamber, he was an original and profound 


220 SPIRITUALISM. 


thinker. His mind united good sense with loft- 
iness of sentiment, circumspection with self: 
respect; he was thoroughly imbued with the 
spirit of his times, at the same time that he 
refused to accept its yoke. In his grave and 
independent course of instruction, he treated 
philosophical questions as they presented them- 
selves step by step, each on its own account, 
without troubling himself about anything but 
the discovery of the truth; and still less with 
any zealous endeavor to set together or resolve 
all the questions upon a general system, the re- 
sult of any learned premeditation. Those who 
had opportunities of listening to him, and even 
those whose only means of judgment are the 
fragments published by M. Jouffroy,* character- 
ize his lessons as directed, each of them, toward 
some special questions well determined before- 
hand, and they regard them as models of 
analysis and of philosophical criticism, scrupu- 


*In his “Traduction des cuvres completes de Reid,” vol. iii, 
pp. 299-449, vol. iv, pp. 278-451, 


& 
SPIRITUALISM. 297 


lously confined by the lecturer to the facts and 
the results that the inductive process discovers 
in the facts themselves. He had been a great 
reader of the writings of the Scotch philoso- 
phers, held them in high esteem, and walked in 
their steps; his views were, however, loftier, 
and his footing firmer, although not less pru- 
dent. He had in his short philosophical career 
two rare pieces of good fortune: one was, that 
he had a friend in M. Maine de Biran, a pro- 
found and enthusiastic observer of the human 
soul in his own soul—a subtle metaphysician, 
almost a mystic, whom I would, if I dared, 
name the Saint Theresa of philosophy ; his other 
advantage was, that he had for his disciple M. 
Cousin, the congenial rival and eloquent inter- 
preter of the great philosophers of all ages. M. 
Cousin, in his turn, has been fortunate in having 
for his disciple M. Jouffroy—a disciple, of mind 
original and independent, following a master 
accomplished in the art of observing intellectual 


and moral facts, and of describing them and 


* 


of) SPIRITUALISM. 


ordering them, without altering their essential 
character. Sometimes, it is true, M. Cousin 
yields to the ambition of his thought, or is 
swayed by the intellectual current of opinions 
in vogue; but very soon his common sense 
checks, or at least sets him on his guard—a com- 
mon sense that finds lucid expression, and is dis- 
tinguished by probity of intent. Such are the 
founders and the glorious chiefs of the spiritual- 
istic school of the nineteenth century. 

Nor have they failed to find disciples and 
heirs worthy of such predecessors. For some 
years past it has been the custom, in certain 
regions of the learned world, to demand, frivo- 
lously enough, and in a tone not free from irony, 
“What has become of the spiritualistic school | 
—what can 1t be about?” I will not answer 
for it as Tertullian did to the Pagans, “We 
are only of yesterday, and we are everywhere— 
in your domains, your cities, your isles, your 
fortresses, your communes, your councils, your 


camps, your tribes, your ‘decuries,” in the 
? 3 b) 


” 
SPIRITUALISM. 223 


palace, the senate, the forum; we only leave you 
your temples.* The modern Spiritualists had 
no such conquests to make, and it is fitting for 
philosophers to be more modest; but however 
short my experience may have taught me that 
the human memory may in similar cases some- 
times be, I am astonished that men should so 
forget facts, and facts, too, that are recent and 
patent. What school of philosophy ever fur- 
nished in half a century so many men and so 
many works, some of eminence, all of them of dis- 
tinguished merit? I will cite only a few names: 
MM. de Rémusat, Damiron, Adolphe Garnier, 
Franck, Jules Simon, Barthélemy, Saint-Hilaire, 
Saisset, Caro, Bersot, Lévéque, Bouillier, Janet, 
some of whom have scarcely disappeared from 
the stage of the world, and others are only just 
arrived there—they belong all to the spiritual- 
istic school, to which they have all done honor 
by important works on philosophy, whether 
speculative, historical, political, economic, or 


* Tertullian Apologet., ch. xxxvii, 


224. . SPIRITUALISM. 


practical. ‘Their doctrines, it is true, have now 
been for some time hotly attacked, and the wind 
of the day does not blow into their sails. They 
have, besides, in my opinion, been wrong in this 
respect, that they have not directed sufficient 
attention to these polemics; that they have 
combated in a manner too indirect, or with too 
little energy; the ideas in whose name their own 
have been assailed; a certain share of languorand 
of embarrassment is at this moment the malady 
of the best minds and of the sincerest convic- 
tions. But in spite of the blows which it re 
ceives and returns, although with insufficient 
sturdiness, the spiritualistic school, if we judge 
it by the names and the works which belong 
to it, by their talent, and their fame, remains 
in our century in possession of the domain and | 
of the banner. of philosophy, 

Its merits will present themselves still more 
clearly if we examine closely the results of its 
labors. 


The first and the most important result, in a 


SPIRITUALISM. 225 


point of view purely philosophical, is, that the 
Spiritualists of our days have given to their 
researches and to their ideas a character really 
scientific: they have introduced into the study 
of man and of the intellectual world, the method 
practiced with so much success in the study of 
man and of the material world—that is to say, 
they have taken the observation of facts as the 
point of departure and the constant guide of 
their investigations. Are there in man and in 
the intellectual world, as there are in man and 
in the material world, facts capable of being 
observed, seized, described, classified, general- 
ized? This is the question which the spiritual- 
istic school proposed and discussed at the out- 
set. I have no hesitation in saying, that it 
resolved it in the affirmative, and that, thanks 
to this school, psychology has assumed its rank 
among the positive sciences, just as physiology 
did. Like physiology, geology, or botany, 
psychology has its special object, its determined 


domain, in which it proceeds absolutely accord- 
15 


226 SPIRITUALISM. 


ing to the same method observed by the physical 
sciences in their domain. That this method, 
the observation of facts, of their value and their 
laws, is in psychology more difficult to be fol- 
lowed than in the physical sciences, is certain ; 
but this certainly does not deprive psychology 
either of its domain or of its scientific character. 
It is a science by the same right and upon the 
same conditions as all the others areso. The la- 
bors of the spiritualistic school, and particularly 
those of M. Jouffroy, have given it a solid found- 
ation: and this has been formally recognized by 
several even among the adversaries of this school, 
among others by M. Taine and M. Berthelot.* 
It is in the name of science and by the pro- 


cesses of science that the Spiritualists of the 


*T read in the Métaphysique et la Science of M. Vacherot : 

“ The Metaphysician : 

“In his denial of psychology, I stop at once the author of 
the ‘ positive philosophy,’ and I demand of him by what right 
he thus banishes from the domain of the experimental sciences 
a science of observation. 

“ The man of learning : 

“Tt constitutes in effect a ‘hiatus’ in this philosophy, and a 


7 


SPIRITUALISM. } 297 


nineteenth have combated the Sensualists of the 
eighteenth century. They have not, it is true, 
absolutely crushed Materialism, that child and 
legitimate heir of Sensualism; but while de- 
throning the parent, they have compelled the 
child sometimes to avow himself boldly, some- 
times to transform himself, and to assume other 
features and other arms than those of his cradle. 
I will only cite the lecture of M. Cousin on the 
“Sensualistic Philosophy in the Highteenth Cen- 
tury,” and the essay of the Duke de Broglie on 
the “ Existence of the Soul,”* written on the 


hiatus which all the sound minds of the positive school are be- 
ginning to admit. M. Littré, for example, may make his reser- 
vations of opinion as to the manner in which our psychologists 
understand psychology, and as to the method which they apply 
to it; but he has too much sense not to admit that the intelli- 
gence—all that constitutes man’s identity, the moral man—is 
the object of a peculiar study, of which many previous works 
have shown the possibility, and many practical results prove 
the high and vital interest.”—Vacherot, la Métaphysique et la 
Science, vol. iii, p. 181. 

*This essay, first inserted in 1828 in the Revue Francaise, 
has been reprinted in the “ Ecrits et discours divers” of the 
Duke de Broglie, collected and published in 1863. 


228 SPIRITUALISM, 


occasion of the work of M. Broussais: “De 
VIrritation et de la Folie.” "Whoever, after hav- 
ing read them, would still persist in maintaining 
the Sensualism of Locke and of Condillac, or in 
refusing to see the consequences to which Sen- 
sualism leads, would prove, in my opinion, that 
he has not understood either the question put, 
or the doctrine combated and refuted. We 
have here a result acquired for the science of 
the intellectual world, and we owe the result 
to the polemics of the spiritualistic school. 
That school has obtained another result more 
important still, and which belongs no longer to 
the polemics of simple negation, but to positive 
doctrine; it has set in the broad light of day 
the real and fundamental principle of morals, 
the distinction as to the essentials of moral good 
and evil, as well as the law. of obligation, that 
“ categorical imperative,” the sole refuge which 
Kant found against Skepticism. Neither the 
interest well defined of each individual, nor the 


interest of the greater numbers, nor any senti- 


SPIRITUALISM. 229 


mental sympathy, nor any system of positive 
written law, can, for the future, be considered 
as the basis of morals. An attempt is made in 
the present day to establish another thesis, and 
to represent morality as absolutely independent 
_ of religion. Grave error, which discards from 
morality, if not its principle, at least its source 
and its object, its author and its future; an 
error, however, very different from those errors 
which dispense even with the principle of 
morals, and assign as the rule for the conduct of 
men, motives having in themselves nothing 
moral, nothing absolute. The fact that man’s 
conscience and man’s reason recognize the dis- 
tinction of moral good and evil, and at the same 
time the duty of practicing that good as the 
law of human actions, is a fact which we may 
now regard as acquired to philosophy. The 
treatise “Du Bien,” in the work of M. Cousin 
upon “Le Vrai, le Beau, et le Bien,” the preface 
of M. Jouffroy to the “Outlines of Moral Phi- 
losophy,” by Dugald Stewart, and the “ Essia 


230 SPIRITUALISM. 


sur la Morale,” in the “Mélanges Philoso- 
phiques,” which M. Jouffroy published in 1833, 
the book of M. Jules Simon upon “Le Devoir,” 
these are all solid and brilliant works, by which 
the spiritualistic school has victoriously estab- 
lished the truth to which I have referred. 

And in establishing it, it has paid a remark- 
able act of homage to another fact, and rendered 
an immense service by enforcing a truth, with 
which are intimately connected man’s rights in 
this world, as well as his prospects beyond this 
world: I mean the fact of man’s liberty. This 
is no question of pure theory and scientific 
curiosity; but a vital question, whose solution 
has for man, in time present and time future, 
the most important practical consequences. 
Upon what grounds would the claim of man 
to liberty in the social state rest, what would 
become of his hopes and fears of a future 
eternity, if man were not a being morally free 
and responsible for the decisions which determ- 


ine his acts? The civil liberty of man during 


SPIRITUALISM. 951 


his life on earth, and his future destiny after his 
life on earth, closely depend upon the fact of 
his free volition and upon the responsibility 
which accompanies it. Without free volition 
man falls in this world, without rights, under 
the yoke of whatever force may take possession 
of him, or use him as its instrument; what 
remains for man, then, but to tremble at the 
destiny which awaits him beyond this world by 
virtue of the unknown decree of his Sovereign 
Master? ‘To the spiritualistic school belongs 
the honor of having firmly established and 
rendered plain the psychological fact of the 
freedom of the human will; nor in doing so has 
it allowed itself to be troubled and blinded by 
the ontological questions which that fact sug- 
gests, or by the difficulty attending the solu- 
tion of these questions. Consequently, it has 
accepted upon this point the limits of man’s 
science, and at the same time maintained the 
rights of man’s nature. It has laid in man’s 


liberty and man’s responsibility the legitimate 


232 SPIRITUALISM. 


foundation of political liberty, as well as that of 
the personal morality of man and of man’s future. 

Thus, then, the spiritualistic school of the 
nineteenth century is at once scientific, moral, 
liberal. Eminent merits, rare combination in 
any time, and still more so in our time! 

With these great merits, and in spite of them, 
two omissions are still remarkably striking. 

The spiritualistie school, our contemporary, 
' has halted abruptly before the sovereign prob- 
lems which weigh upon the human soul, and 
which, in the first series of these “Medita- 
tions,” I styled natural problems;* it has in 
no respect furthered their solution according to 
reason, or accepted their solution according to 
| Christianity ; its “'Theodicy” has remained far 
in arrear of its Psychology. Halted it has, 
also, before any practical solution of these same 
problems; nor has it eliminated either any 
faith or any law which suffices for man’s soul 
or man’s conduct in life—in short, any religion. 


* Meditations on the Essence of the Christian Religion. 


SPIRITUALISM. 233 


M. Jules Simon, in his work entitled “La Relig- 
ion Naturelle,” MM. Saisset and De Rémusat, in 
their “ Hssais de Philosophie Religieuse,” have 
striven, irrespectively of all positive revelation, 
to give to man’s soul and to man’s conduct that 
satisfaction and that religious rule which both 
require. I doubt their counting much upon the 
success of their attempts; I doubt their believ- 
ing that their natural religion, or their religious 
philosophy, are sufficient substitutes for Chris- 
tianity. Far other things than such drops of 
sclence are required to appease the thirst of 
humanity for religion. 

Whence, in the spiritualistic school, this double 
hiatus—this twofold weakness, whence? 

In my opinion, the causes are themselves 
twofold. The spiritualistic school has been at 
once too timid and too proud. It has not seen 
in the psychological facts which it was observ- 
ing and describing, all that they contain and 
reveal upon the subject of the great natural 


problems of man and of the world; it has 


234 SPIRITUALISM. 


neglected the cosmological facts and the his- 
torical facts which concur to throw light upon 
| those problems; its’ psychology has remained 
isolated and incomplete, It has, at the same 
time, failed to see the limits of psychology and 
of human science in general; not having suc- 
ceeded in advancing the torch of science into 
the regions where access to it is denied, it has 
refused to accept the light descending upon man 
by another way than that of science. 

Like Plato, Descartes, Leibnitz, Reid, and 
Kant, M. Cousin, now the most eminent repre- 
sentative of the spiritualistic school, establishes, 
by virtue of psychological observation, these 
two great facts: first, that there exist universal 
and necessary principles manifesting themselves 
in the human mind, and reigning there without 
bemg capable of being subverted, which are 
called into action by sensations coming trom 
the external world; secondly, that these sensa- 
tions, so coming from the external world, do not 


in any way supply the human mind with these 


SPIRITUALISM. 235 


universal and necessary principles, and that 
they can explain neither their presence nor their 
origin. Such, for instance, are the principles, 
that everything which begins to appear has 
a cause—that every quality belongs to a 
substance!* Sensualism is not in a position to 
account in any way for these two principles, 
or to find them among those facts that form all 
its psychology. 

I am not called upon to develop or to discuss 
this idea, which, for my part, I fully admit; 
enough that I mention it as a fundamental doc- 
trine of the spiritualistic school. 

The philosophers, who have admitted the 
existence of these universal and necessary prin- 
ciples, have assigned them different names, and 
have enumerated and classified them differently; 
but whether they style them “ ideas,” or “innate 
ideas,” or “laws,” or “forms,” or “categories of 
the understanding”—whether they enlarge or 
limit their number—they agree as to their 


* Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien, pp. 19-66. 1857. 


286 SPIRITUALISM. 


nature, and declare them inherent in the human 
mind itself, which applies them, so to say, as its 
own peculiar property in its appreciation of the 
external world; so far is the mind from borrow- 
ing them from that world! 

These universal and necessary principles once 
admitted and characterized, some of the philos- 
ophers who so admit and characterize them, the 
Scotch philosophers for instance, go no farther, 
and adhere to the psychological fact without 
examining its value or its consequences in an 
ontological sense.- Others, like Kant, refuse to 
that psychological fact all ontological value, 
and are of opinion that nothing authorizes us in 
affirming that those principles, inherent in the 
internal existence of the human mind, are true 
in the domain beyond the human mind, or that 
they regulate the realities of the external world, 
as they regulate our intellectual activity. 
Others, finally, M. Cousin, with Plato, Des- 
cartes, Leibnitz, Fenélon, and Bossuet, see the 


work of God, and consequently God himself, in 


SPIRITUALISM. ooe 


the universal and necessary principles which 
preside over the intellectual existence of man; 
and they recognize God as the infinite and 
sovereign being in whom the necessary prin- 
ciples reside; and they regard these as the man- 
ifestations of him, and think that he placed them 
in the intelligence of man when he placed man 
himself in the middle of the world. 

To this doctrine I firmly adhere; but why 
does the spiritualistic school so stop short, why 
does it not advance to the very end of the path 
‘upon which it has entered? It admits God as 
the being in whom these necessary principles 
reside, and from whom man has received them; 
what does this mean but that it recognizes in 
God the author and instructor of man? And 
to recognize in God the author and the in- 
structor of man, what is this but to recognize 
the fact of the creation, and the fact of the 
primitive revelation inherent in the fact of the 
creation? ‘These two truths are involved in the 


fact that the necessary principles exist in the 


238 SPIRITUALISM. 


mind of man, and that man derives them, not 
from his relations with the external world, but 
from himself, and from the source whence he 
himself emanates—from God, his Creator. God 
has created man armed. at all points, as well in 
the order of the intellect as of matter, complete 

in his soul as in his body: that is to say, God 
| has given to him at his creation the necessary 
principles of his intellectual life, just as he 
has given him the necessary mechanism of his 
physical organization. Scientific psychology 
thus mounts up to that supreme point where 
it meets Christian revelation. There is, on its 
part, inconsistency or timidity in not recognizing 
and proclaiming the existence of that light to 
which it so attains, 

What was the import, what the form, of that 
primitive revelation? Has the revelation itself 
been renewed at any epoch subsequent to the 
creation? If so, by what instruments and with 
what incidents has it been renewed? These 


are questions to which I shall recur, but which 


SPIRITUALISM. 239 


for the moment I do not approach; I wish here 
only to establish the fact of the divine revela- 
tion in the sphere and in the terms of scientific 
psychology. 

Facts in cosmogony lead to the same conclu- 
sion. I repeat here what I said in the first 
series of these Meditations, when speaking of 
the dogma of the creation: 

“The only serious opponents of the dogma 
of the creation are those who maintain that the 
universe, the earth, and man upon the earth, 
have existed from all eternity, and, collectively, 
in the state in which they now are. No one, 
however, can hold this language, to which facts 
are invincibly opposed. How many ages man 
has existed on the earth is a question that has 
been largely discussed, and is still under discus. ~ 
sion. ‘The inquiry in no way affects the dogma 
of the creation itself; it is a certain and recog: 
nized fact that man has not always existed on 
the earth, and that the earth has for long pe- 


riods undergone different changes incompatible 


240 SPIRITUALISM. 


A 


with man’s existence. Man, therefore, hada 


beginning: man has come upon the earth.” * 
He did not come there by spontaneous gen- 
eration—that is to say, by any creative force or 
organizing power inherent in matter. Scientific 
observation overturns more and more, every 
day, this hypothesis, which, in other respects 
also, it is impossible to admit as any explana- 
tion of the first appearance upon the earth of 
the complete man, the man in a condition to 
survive. “Another delusion of which we must 
rid ourselves,” said, lately, a member of the 
Academy of Sciences, as he quitted the lecture- 
room where M. Pasteur had been throwing 
upon this subject the light of his luminous and 
scrupulous criticism. The hypothesis of the 
progressive transformation of species does not 
explain better the existence of man, such as we 
now see him upon the earth. This hypothesis 


is also rejected by the exact student of facts; 


* Meditations on the Essence of the Christian Religion, 
page 18. 


SPIRITUALISM. - 241 


even if admitted, it would still leave existing 
the same problems; for, whence came these 
primitive types, whose successive transforma: 
tions have, as supposed, produced the existing 
species? God is as necessary to create the ape 
or the primitive type of the ape as he is neces- 
sary to create man himself. Scientific cosmology | 
accords with scientific psychology. God, the 
creator and instructor of man, is the grand fact 
which each of these sciences encounters at the 
summit of its labors, 

The whole current of history contains the 
same teaching. I admit that error abounds 
in history, that it is full of false assertions, of 
recitals tortured from the truth, facts mutilated, 
legends invented by men as imaginations. It is 
not, for all that, the less certain that in a ereat 
part the truth still remains there, that certain 
historical events are authenticated and attested 
by undeniable testimony. I mention here only 
two, because connected with the subject which 


engages me. It is a general belief, a universal 
16 


949 SPIRITUALISM. 


tradition in the history of nations, that, either 
at the moment of the creation, or at some 
epoch subsequent to creation, the God, or the 
gods, whom those nations respectively adored, 
had had direct relations with man; had become 
manifest to him by different acts or under dit- 
ferent forms, and had assumed a place and 
exercised an active influence upon man’s desti- 
nies. The idea of a single revelation, or of a 
succession of revelations—revelations character- 
ized at one: time by a strange grossness, at 
another by a subtle mysticism, is a thing ever 
recurring in the history of humanity. The 
tradition of the special revelation, proclaimed 
first by the Hebrews, and after them by the 
Christians, is equally undeniable ; criticism may 
apply itself to the volumes that contain the 
accounts; may contest the authenticity or exact- 
itude or date of particular books; but so far 
from ever negativing, it will not even weaken 
the evidence of the existence and the powerful 


influence of the religious tradition which gave 


SPIRITUALISM. 243 


birth to Judaism and to Chnistianity. We 
have here a remarkable historical fact, manifest- 
ing at once the natural faith of mankind in the 
divine revelation, and in the relations of the 
Creator with his creatures. 

_ If the spiritualistic school refused from its 
very origin to admit these facts, drawn from 
cosmogony and from man’s history, into the 
sphere of its labors; if it limited psychology to | 
its peculiar scientific object—the study of the 
human soul—I am far from making such refu- 
sal matter of reproach: for the Spiritualists did 
thereby nothing but what they were entitled 
and called upon to do. But they have fallen 
into a twofold error. While observing and de- 
scribing psychological facts, they did not perceive 
nor accept all that they imported : they saw in 
the intelligent man the work and the trace of 
God; but they did not see what was implied 
in that man besides—that is, revelation as well 
as creation. They did not leave pure psychology 


to demand of kindred sciences, such as cosmology 


944 SPIRITUALISM. “a 


and history, whether their results accorded or 
did not accord with the results that they had 
deduced from psychology. In short, on the one 
side they stopped short of the limits of the 
domain of psychology; and on the other, they 
confined themselves to it too exclusively. 

From this twofold error sprang another still 
more serious. Spiritualism gave birth to Ration- 
alism—a transformation as unnatural as unfor- 
tunate, which has rendered the science of man 
and of the intellectual world still more inexact 


and incomplete! 


THIRD MEDITATION. 


RATION ALISM. 


A MAN of a mind as unprejudiced as rare, one 
who will never be suspected of any undue bias 
for Christianity, M. Sainte-Beuve, avowing to 
me recently the high esteem with which M. 
Alexandre Vinet inspired him, borrowed an 
expression of Pascal’s: “The heart has its 
reasons, which the reason does not compre- 
hend,” * 

I only admit half of what is implied in this 
conciliatory phrase; and these are my reasons. 

True religious faith, or, to call things by 
their real names, Christian faith, is founded 


* Between this phrase and that of Pascal there is a slight 
difference. Pascal said, ‘Le cceur a des raisons que la raison 
ne connait point:” “The heart has reasons that the reason 
knows not at all.” Pensées de Pascal, edition of M. Faugére, 
1844, vol. ii, p. 172. 


246 RATIONALISM, 


upon instincts and upon sentiment at the same 
time that it is founded upon reasons. If reason 
do not accept the sentiments of the heart, on 
which side is the fault? Is the fault with the 
heart, that it feels them, or is it with the reason, 
that it does not comprehend them ? 

My reply to this question is easy. I reject 
the distinction made. I admit no such persons 
as are respectively styled the heart, the reason. 
Here is only an attempt at a psychological 
anatomy; no true enunciation of a real fact. 
Man, the human being, is essentially one, and 
single: he has the faculty of self-observation 
and self-study, but in exercising it he does not 
destroy the unity of his nature; it is not his 
mere reason, it is himself, and his whole self, 
that makes himself the object of his observation 
and of his study, and that cannot but recognize 
himself and accept himself in his entirety. He 
has no right to say, with an air of scientific dis- 
dain, “ My reason comprehends not the reasons 


of my heart.” He mist perforce say: “I com- 


RATIONALISM. 247 


prekend not myself;” he must perforce proclaim, 
not the incoherency of his being, but the insuf- 
ficiency or the incompetency of what he styles 
his reason. 

Philosophy, like poetry, is full of personi- 
fications that mislead; the one personifies by 
images, the other by abstractions. Both have 
need of them—the one for its creations, the 
other for its studies; I am far from seeking to 
deny their respective use. All that I contend 
for is, that we must not misconceive the real 
import of these expedients of human language; 
we must not, by taking them for realities, lose 
sight of or destroy what are really and genu- 
inely realities, the entities of divine creation. 

I insist. the more on this error, because in the 
philosophy of our time it is a common and 4 
potent error, and the source too of other errors, 
deplorable as well in a scientific as in a moral 
and practical point of view. Condillac and his 
disciples had set apart and specially studied in 


man the faculty of sensation, and they were 


248 RATIONALISM. 


thereby led to make out of this faculty, and out 
of it alone, man himself and the whole man. 
Kant and his school considered particularly in 
man the faculty of the reason and judgment, 
and very soon reason came with them to con- 
stitute the whole man. I am far from intend- 
ing to examine in its fundamental principles and 
its entirety the system of Kant, the greatest 
philosophical work upon the human under. 
standing that any man has produced since the 
_ time of Plato. I single out this fact, that it 
"treats the reason as the proper, special, and par- 
amount object of philosophy. Warned by his 
profound, scrupulous genius, Kant did not limit 
himself to a point of view so narrow, although 
so lofty; he studied man’s reason under its dif: 
ferent aspects, he constituted himself the critic 
of pure reason, the critic of practical reason, the 
critic of sesthetic reason—that is, of reason ap- 
pled to the discrimination of the beautiful; he 
decomposed, so to say, the reason itself into as 


many different faculties as he found different 


RATIONALISM. 249 


phases in the intellectual and moral life of man; 
but the faculty that he styled the reason re- 
mained the basis of his study and of his system. 
It became in his school, and in the schools akin 
to it, preeminently the intellectual substance, 
the basis of man and of philosophy; and the 
human being himself, in his personal unity, 
with all his life and his free will, entirely dis- 
appeared from their teaching. 

As results of this system I will cite only 
two facts, very different in their nature, both 
very foreign to the founder of the system and 
his disciples, but which serve the better to 
reveal that system’s faultiness, as these facts 
are, although its indirect, remote, and involun- 
tary, nevertheless, its undeniable consequences. 

When, in 1793, the frenzied men who dis- 
posed, as masters, of the destinies of France, 
abolished the Christian religion and Christian 
worship, they resolved, nevertheless, to give to 
men an object to adore. They instituted the 


worship of reason. The church of Notre. 


250 | RATIONALISM. 


Dame at Paris was metamorphosed into a 
temple of reason; a young woman was made 
to figure there as the goddess of reason; and 
the orator of the National Convention, Chau- 
-mette, cried aloud as he pointed her out to the 
people, “ Behold living Reason; we celebrate 
here to-day the sole true worship, the worship 
of Liberty and of Reason.” — 

At the distance of three quarters of a century 
from the date of these revolutionary orgies, in 
1865, not in France but in England, a man of 
earnest intentions, superior mind, and extensive 
learning, whose sincerity is evident, and his 
sentiments moral at once and moderate, writes 
a book entitled, “Rationalism in Europe;” and 
the object of this book is to establish, that all 
the good effected in Europe since the fall of the 
Roman empire, all the progress made by states 
in justice, in humanity, in liberty, and general 
happiness—whether in the sphere of science or 
of practical industry—is due to the influence of 


Rationalism, to its developments and its con- 


RATIONALISM. 251 


quests. Mr. Lecky is not a metaphysician; he 
attaches no precise and philosophical meaning 
to the word “Rationalism;” he does not 
trouble himself about the system of Kant, nor 
the place occupied in it by the pure, the practi- 
cal, or the esthetic reason; he only retraces the 
intellectual and social history of Europe, and 
all the happy results that this history com- 
memorates, all the salutary consequences of the 
activity of the human mind, of the liberty of 
man’s thought, of the amelioration of human 
institutions and manners, he sums up all in a 
single name, attributes them to a single cause, 
and assigns all the honor to the progress of 
Rationalism ! 

Arrived, nevertheless, at the conclusion of his 
work, a single reflection disquiets Mr. Lecky: 
he asks himself whether, in extolling the happy 
effects of what he styles Rationalism, he has 
not gone too far, said too much, and hoped too 
much: “Utility is perhaps the highest motive 


. to which reason can attain. . . . It is from the 


952 RATIONALISM. “ 


moral or religious faculty alone that we obtain 
the conception of the purely disinterested. . . . 
The substitution of the philosophical conception 
of truth for its own sake, for the theological con- 
ception of the guilt of error, has been in this 
respect a clear gain; and the political move- 
ment which has resulted chiefly from the intro- 
duction of the spirit of Rationalism into politics, 
has produced, and is producing, some of the 
most splendid instances of self-sacrifice. On the 
whole, however, the general tendency of these 
influences is unfavorable to enthusiasm, and 
both in actions and in speculations this tendency 
is painfully visible. With a far higher level of 
average excellence than in former times, our age 
exhibits a marked decline in the spirit of self. 
sacrifice, in the appreciation of the more poetical 
or religious aspect of our nature. The history 
of self-sacrifice during the last eighteen hundred 
years has been mainly the history of the action 
of Christianity upon the world. Ignorance and 


error have, no doubt, often directed the heroic - 


RATIONALISM. 253 


spirit into wrong channels, and have sometimes 
even made it a cause of great evil to mankind; 
but it is the moral type and beauty, the enlarged 
conception and persuasive power of the Chris- 
tian faith, that have chiefly called it into being, 
and it is by their influence alone that it can be 
permanently sustained... . 

“This is the shadow resting upon the other- 
wise brilliant picture the history of Rationalism 
presents. The destruction of the belief in witch- 
craft and of religious persecutions; the decay of 
those ghastly notions concerning future punish- 
ments, which for centuries diseased the imagina- 
tions and embittered the character of mankind ; 
the emancipation of suffering nationalities; the 
abolition of the belief in the guilt of error, 
which paralyzed the intellectual, and of the 
asceticism which paralyzed the material prog- 
ress of mankind, may be justly regarded as 
among the greatest triumphs of civilization; 
but when we look back to the cheerful alacrity 


with which, in some former ages, men sacrificed 


254 RATION ALISM. 


all their material and intellectual interests to 
what they believed to be right, and when we 
realize the unclouded assurance that was their 
reward, it is impossible to deny that we have 


lost something in our progress,” * 


But to leave England and Mr, Lecky, and 


to return once more to France. I turn to the | 


pages of a rationalistic philospher more pro- 
found, and more profoundly troubled, too, in 
his sentiments than Mr. Lecky. I find there, in 
an essay of M. Edmond Scherer, entitled “The 
Crisis of Protestantism,”+ the following passage: 

“That which is really imperiled is not so 
much Protestantism; it is Christianity, it is 


very religion. As for natural religion, that 


" exists only in books. Religions which have vital 


force and influence are positive religions; that IS, 


religions which have a Church, and particular 


* History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rational- 
ism in Europe, by W. E. H. Lecky, vol. li, 1866, third edition, 
pp. 403-409. 

tMélanges histoire religieuse. Pp. 250-254. 1864. 


als, 


RATIONALISM. Ls JOS 


rites, and dogmas. What are these dogmas? 
Taken in their intimate meaning, they are the 
solutions of the great problems which have 
ever disquieted the- mind of man—the origin 
_ of the world, and of evil; the expiation ; the 
future of humanity. The doctrines of religion 
are a sort of revealed metaphysics. 
"Considered in its form, dogma is the super- 
natural—not merely because religions were born 
at an epoch when the imagination was greedy 
of miracles, and when the imagination, in her 
naiveté, associated herself with everything; but 
also because, as may be readily understood, it is 
impossible for a positive religion to have any 
other origin than a revelation; it is necessarily 
a history of the intervention of God in the 
destinies of man, the account of acts by which 
God created and saved the world—it is that or — 
it is nothing. We see then at once that in re- 
ligion everything is not religious. There is in 
every religion a multitude of elements, histor- 


_ teal, physical, and metaphysical, as to which its 


256 RATIONALISM, 


dogmas may come into conflict with science. 
Nevertheless, it is not of this antagonism that I 
would here speak. The religious sentiment has 
also its critical action; 7¢ also may enter into a 
struggle with religion. 

“As long as the authority of the priest or 


of the book preserves its prestige, the believer 


receives his religion ready made for him, with- 
out himself making distinctions ; but as soon as 
that authority is shaken, a man, if he do not 
entirely reject his first belief, will at least no 
longer accept it without reservations. He only 
retains so much of it as enlightens or touches 
him, so much as commends itself to his under. 
standing or to his heart; so much, in a word, as 
"gives a satisfaction to his religious requirements, 

“Thus it is that religious sentiment becomes 
the measure of religious truth. 1t recerves all 
in religion that addresses itself to the soul, all 
that nourishes and fortifies the soul, all that 
raises the soul to the infinite and the ideal, all 


that. unites the soul to God. Religious senti- 
d 


RATION ALISM. 257 


ment appropriates it all, but it appropriates 
nothing more. Let but a thing become indif- 
ferent, and it feels it as an importunity, and 
looks upon it in the light of an element strange, 
useless, arbitrary. It rejects, for this reason, 
doctrines purely speculative as well as facts 
purely marvelous. Man requires his religion 
to be entirely religious; that is to say, to be in 
all respects in direct relation with piety, and, 
so to speak, to be vertical to his conscience. 
The more his faith purifies itself, the more a 
man eliminates from his religion dogmas which, 
having no root either in the divine nature or 
man’s nature, appear on that very account to 
have no ground to exist at all. 

“ At first sight this gradual emancipation of 
faith and this corresponding progress of religion 
in the ways of Spiritualism, seem a natural pro- 
cess by means of which religious opinion and 
the human mind contrive to maintain them- 
selves in a state of constant equilibrium. We 


imagine all difficulties removed, and fancy that 
17 


258 RATIONALISM. - 


we catch a glimpse of the religious future of 
humanity in a sort of Christian Rationalism, 
a rational Christianity not excluding fervor of 
devotion, but leaving all its liberty to man’s 
thought. 

“T demand nothing better as far as I am con- 
cerned; but I cannot refrain from asking, not 
without anxiety, whether Christian Rationalism 
is really a religion. What remains in the cru- 
cible after the operation just detailed? Is the 
residue really the essence of the positive dog- 
mas, or is it but a caput mortuwm? When 
Christianity is rendered translucent to man’s 
mind, conformable to man’s reason and man’s 
moral appreciation of things, does it still 
possess any great virtue? Does it not very 
much resemble Deism, and is it not equally 
lean and sterile? Does not the potent in- 
fluence of religious belief reside in its dog- 
matic formulas and marvelous legends just as 
much as in anything more essentially religious 


that it possesses? Is there not even somewhat 


RATIONALISM. 259 


of superstition in genuine piety, and is it 
possible for piety to dispense with that popular 
system of metaphysics, that attractive mythol- 
ogy, which men strive to eliminate from it? 
Do not the elements which you pretend to 
abstract from religion constitute the alloy, with- 
out which the precious metal becomes unsuit- 
able for the rough usages of life? In short, 
when criticism shall have succeeded in over- 
throwing the supernatural as useless, and dog- 
mas as irrational ; when the religious sentiment 
on the one side, and a scrupulous reason on the 
other, shall have penetrated man’s belief, assim- 
ilated and transformed it; when no other au- 
thority shall remain standing, save that of the 
personal conscience of each individual; when, 
in a word, man having torn every vail and 
penetrated every mystery, shall behold that 
God face to face to whom he aspires, will it 
not be discovered that that God is, after all, 
nothing else than man himself, the conscience 


and the reason of humanity personified? Will 


260 RATIONALISM. 


not religion, in the very attempt to become 
more religious, have ceased to exist ?” 

Such, according to the views of its most 
eminent representatives, are the potent influ- 
ences and the final results of Rationalism. 
After having confusedly attributed to it all the 
progress of man’s thought and of man’s civil- 
ization, Mr. Lecky expresses the apprehension 
that he has lowered the nature of man, by de- 
priving him (these are his very words) “ of our 
noblest quality, of the divine spark, the prin- 
ciple in us of everything that is heroic,” the 
complete and pure devotedness of Christian 
faith. M. Scherer asks himself sadly if in re- 
jecting all dogma and all positive revelation, in 
obliging religious sentiment to be self-sufficing, 
and to feed itself with its own and single virtue, 
rational criticism does not inflict a deadly blow 
upon religion itself; and M. Sainte-Beuve, in the 
same perplexity, contents himself with saying, as 
resignedly, though more coldly, “'The heart has 


its reasons, which the reason comprehends not.” 


RATIONALISM. 261 


Nothing is so affecting to me, but nothing, 
at the same time, throws such light upon the 
subject of my meditations as this mvoluntary, 
this invincible anxiety observable in men of 
lofty sentiments and profound convictions, 
when confronting the chasms in their system, 
and dealing with the incoherences of their 
own convictions. However profound, however 
different my own conviction may be, I have no 
desire to engage, either with them or against 
them, in any direct or prolonged controversy. 
I have been engaged all my life in frequent and 
ardent polemics, Those could not be well 
avoided by a man like myself, forced not merely 
to combat human opinions, but to grapple with 
human affairs; and called upon to resolve, upon 
the instant, practical and urgent questions. But — 
while I voluntarily submitted to the necessity of 
precipitate and unforeseen struggles, experience 
has taught me their inconveniences and their 
perils. The combatants on each side are prone 


to make use of weapons of too offensive 


262 RATIONALISM, 


a nature; men involve themselves for party 
interests and party honor, and push their con- 
clusions with obstinate pertinacity beyond the 
strictness of truth, sometimes even beyond their 
own intentions. I do not wish in the arena of 
philosophy to run the risk of striking upon any 
similar rock; but avoiding all personal polemics, 
all controversy of detail, I will express upon the 
essence of Rationalism, although only in a gen- 
eral manner, my sincere and intimate convictions. 


There are in Rationalism two fundamental 


_ errors. First, it mutilates man while it studies 


him; it holds as of no account several of the 
constituent elements and essential facts of 
human nature, of which it ignores the meaning 


and the import. Secondly, Rationalism extends 


| the pretensions of human science beyond its 


rights, and beyond its legitimate limits. 

The instincts, the sentiments, of humanity are 
certainly not sufficient reasons for scientific con- 
viction, nor conclusive proofs in support of any 


particular system whatever, The instinctive 


RATIONALISM. 263 


belief of the human race in one or more super- 
natural forces 1s no demonstration of the reality 
of the supernatural; and the aspirings of man’s 
soul for a life beyond this terrestrial one does 
not rationally prove the soul’s immortality. 
Error may occur in human instincts or sen- 
timents just as much as in human ideas. But 
when these instincts and these sentiments are 
universal, permanent, indestructible, encoun- 
tered in all ages and in all countries—when they 
resist and survive all attacks, all doubts of 
reason or sclence—they are, beyond all question, 
considerable facts, and facts which the human 
understanding cannot but recognize and respect. 
If these instincts and sentiments do not solve 
the problems which trouble man’s under- 
standing, at least they demand imperiously 
some solution; if they throw no light upon his 
road to science, they oblige him to see that that 
road has its mysteries. Rationalism mutilates 
humanity when it ignores such facts, regarding 


them as vain illusions because it cannot explain 


264 -. RATION ALISM. 


them; and when, after this mutilation, it 
assigns the entire empire to a single portion of 
the human nature, to a single faculty, called by 
it reason, as if reason constituted the entire 
man, Rationalism does in the intellectual world 
what it would be doing in the physical world 
did it deny the reality of night because it only 
sees the day clearly. 
Rationalism is the more wrong in thus dis- 
carding facts which it does not explain, that in 
its proper domain similar facts occur, and that 
its science of reason arrives also finally at 
mysteries. I mentioned it before, as a truth 
acquired to philosophy, that there exist in the 
human mind certain universal and necessary 
principles, neither furnished to the mind by 
impressions derived from the external world, 
nor created by the mind itself; and that those 
principles are inherent in the nature of the 
mind, and come to it from another souree than 
that of sensation, or any discovery of man’s own 


thought. We have here a psychological fact 


RATIONALISM, _ 265 


which, after the profound studies of the spiritual- 
istic school from the time of Plato down to M. 
Cousin, Rationalism is obliged to admit. To 
what does this fact tend, and what is its logical 
consequence? What but God, creation, revela- 
tion, and the relations of God with man? Will 
Rationalism give any better explanation of 
these divine laws of the human mind than it 
has given of the instincts and of the sentiments 
of the human heart? or will it ignore the one 
result as it has ignored the other ? 

But now to touch upon the radical and per- 
manent error of Rationalism. It regards all _ 
things as accessible to the researches and to the 
methods of human science. When Spiritualism 
has recognized and proclaimed the essential and 
necessary facts which constitute the intellectual 
and moral being by it styled man, it halts 
abruptly; it hesitates also to recognize and 
proclaim the mysterious facts in that sanctuary 
the very door of which it has reached; it does 


not resign itself to adore what lies behind the 


266 RATION ALISM, 


vail; it is consequent and timid, although 
respectful and modest. Rationalism, on the 
contrary, 1s presumptuous and audacious; 
its ambition isto see clearly, to touch what is 
in the center of the sanctuary, as it sees and 
touches what is on its outside. Its pretension 
is that it may study and know, by its ordinary 
_ processes, as well the invisible world, its Sover- 
eign and its laws, as the visible world in which 
man is now placed; and it wars upon Chris- 
tianity because Christianity admits no such 
pretension. But Christianity here encounters 
another adversary, Positivism. Positivism ar- 
rests its progress, saying: “I do not know, 
nobody knows, if an invisible world be or be 
not a really existing thing. It is a mere loss 
of time to think of it, for nothing can be known 
about it with certainty. All religion, all meta- 
physics, are chimerical and vain sciences; there 
is no science but the science of the physical 


world, of its facts and of its laws!” 


FOURTH MEDITATION. 


POSITIVISM. 


I srex no quarrel with words, even when 
they provoke it. Positivism is a word, in lan- 
guage a barbarism, in philosophy a presump- 
tion. Unlike Geology, ' Ideology, Theology, 
Physics, it qualifies a doctrine, not by its 
object, but by its supposed merit. All science 
pretends to positiveness—that is, to be founded 
upon fact and truth. But “Positivism” alone 
arrogates to itself this quality. It is an arro- 
gance, in my opinion, radically unjustifiable. 

I knew its founder, M. Auguste Comte, per- 
sonally. I had some communication with him 
in the period from 1824 to 1830, I then was 
struck by the elevation of his sentiments and 
by the vigor of his mind. In October, 1832, 


268 POSITIVISM. 


at the moment when I was entering upon my 
functions as Minister of Public Instruction, he 
came to me and formally demanded that I 
should create for him in the “College of France” ’ 
a professorship of general history for the phys- 
ical and mathematical sciences. I see no cause 
to express myself here otherwise than I have 
already done in my “Memoirs” as to the im- 
pression produced upon me by his conversation 
and his personal bearing. “He explained to 
me drearily and confusedly his views upon 
man, society, civilization, religion, philosophy, 
history. He was a man single-minded, honest, 
of profound convictions, devoted to his own 
ideas, in appearance modest, although at heart 
prodigiously vain; he sincerely believed that 
it was his calling to open a new era for the 
mind of man and for human society. While 
listening to him, I could hardly refrain from 
expressing my astonishment that a mind so 
vigorous should at the same time be so narrow 


as not even to perceive the nature and bearing 


POSITIVISM. 269 


of the facts with which he was dealing, and the 
questions which he was authoritatively decid- 
ing; that a character so disinterested should 
‘not be warned by his own proper sentiments— 
which were moral in spite of his system—of its 
falsity and its negation of morality. I did not 
even make any attempt at discussion with M. 
Comte: his sincerity, his enthusiasm, and the 
delusion that blinded him, inspired me with 
that sad esteem that takes refuge in silence. 
Had I even judged it fitting to create the chair 
which he demanded, I should not for a moment 
have dreamed of assigning it to him.” * 

I should have been as silent and still more 
sad if I had then known the trials through 
which M. Auguste Comte had already passed. 
He had been, in 1823, a prey to a violent at- 
tack of mental alienation, and in 1827, during 
a paroxysm of gloomy melancholy, he had 


* “ Mémoires pour servir a Vhistoire de mon temps,” t. iii, 
pp. 125-7. In the sixth volume of these Mémoires I have 
rectified an error inadvertently committed by me as to the 
epoch of my first relations with M. Auguste Comte. 


270. POSITIVISM. 


thrown himself from the Pont des Arts into 
the Seine, but had been rescued by one of 
the king’s guard. More than once, in the 
course of his subsequent life, this mental - 
trouble seemed upon the point of recurring. 
Many will be tempted to demand how a man 
so little master of himself, and whose mind was 
under so little government, could ever have suc- 
ceeded in producing a doctrine so considerable, 
and in exercising such real influence upon the 
philosophical world. ‘The fact is nevertheless 
beyond question. Whether the cause is to be 
referred to the merit of M. Comte and of his 
doctrine, or to the state of men’s minds at the 
time, it is certain that not only in France but in 
Europe, and particularly in England, numerous 
and honorable disciples came over to his ideas, 
and that Positivism became a school wanting 
neither in sincerity nor credit. When such men 
as M. Littré, at Paris, and Mr. J. Stuart Mill, in 
London, declare themselves his adherents, the 


doctrine has claims to a serious examination. 


POSITIVISM. | 271 


M. Auguste Comte lived constantly, as far as 
ne was individually concerned, under the 
empire of a fixed idea, which occasioned him 
many a painful disappointment; and he lived, 
as far as his system was concerned, under the 
empire of a false idea, which associated with 
views just in themselves and sometimes grand, 
one pervading and permanent error. 

His fixed personal idea consisted in his think- 
ing himself called to regenerate human science 
and human society by the single virtue of his 
doctrine. Besides their share in the presump- 
tuousness which is the common character of 
mankind, minds that are inventive and fond of 
systematizing are particularly prone to extend 
beyond their legitimate bearings—nay, beyond 
all bounds—the pretensions and the hopes 
which their ideas suggest. M. Auguste Comte 
was one of the most striking instances, as well 
as one of the most honest victims, of this -intel- 
lectual intoxication—the noblest although not 


the least fantastic form of human pride. The 


972 POSITIVISM. 


Christian religion has its apostles and it has its 
missionaries, speaking in the name of a Master 
other than themselves, and preaching a faith 
they did not themselves originate. M. Auguste 
Comte was his own proper apostle—the invent- 
or and missionary of his own proper faith. Of 
profound convictions, with no selfish, worldly 
views, he aspired to the entire empire of the 
intellect, believing both the interests of social 
order and the honor of the human mind 
involved in the triumph of his doctrine; he 
ardently desired not only its propagation, but 
its organization as a permanent and potent in- 
stitution, to insure and perpetuate his triumph. 
The real and practical government of nations, 
according to him, was only, as it’ ought to be 
only, a sort of stewardship, charged with the 
duty of realizing and carrying into effect the 
ideas of thinking men. “The systematic sepa- 
ration of the two elementary forces, the Spiritual 
and the Temporal,” so he wrote to Mr. J. Stuart 


Mill, “ constitutes certainly the principal condi- 


POSITIVISM. 2738 


tion for a dénouement of the actual situation. I 
admit that the special requirements of a situa- 
tion where those two forces are confounded may 
authorize, and sometimes oblige, philosophers, in 
the interest of a final regeneration, to participate, 
by way of exception, in actual political life, 
although an inclination for such a life exposes 
them to the danger of many a quicksand, and 
demands that their principles should be firmly 
settled, to avoid the risk of a real deviation. 
To embody my thought upon this subject in a 
palpable example relative to a great occurrence, 
I blame the philosopher Condorcet for having 
sufiered himself to be returned as member to 
our glorious Convention, in which men of action 
were leaders, and properly so, whereas Condor. 
cet could never be so placed as to regard things 
from the same point of view; hence that false 
position for which in the sequel he had so cruelly 
to suffer. But on the contrary, I should have 
regarded it as very natural for him to develop a 


great activity in the club of the Jacobins ; for, 
18 


rs 


274 POSITIVISM. 


placed beyond the sphere of the government, 
properly so called, that club constituted at that 
time a sort of spiritual power, in that remark- 
able and so little comprehended combination of 
things which characterized the revolutionary 
regime... . I have learned with much satisfac. 
tion,” he added, still addressing Mr. Mill, “that 
the wise energy of your resistance has succeeded 
in trrumphing over the blind persistence of your 
friends who urge you toward a parliamentary 
career, I shall propose in my last volume, and 
in direct terms, the institution, by individual 
efforts, of an Kuropean committee, charged per- 
manently with the direction of a common move- 
ment of philosophical regeneration, when once 
Positivism shall have planted its standard—that 
is, 1ts lighthouse, I should term it—in the midst 
of the disorder and confusion that reigns; and I 
hope that this will be the result of the publica- 


tion of my work in its complete state.” * 


* Letters of the 20th November, 1841, and 4th March, 1842, 
published in the work of M. Littré, entitled, “ Auguste Comte 
and the Positive Philosophy,” pp. 424, 425, 427, 429. 


POSITIVISM. 275 


One can scarcely refrain from a smile when — 
he contemplates these dreams reduced to the 
form of system, ignoring every sentiment of 
reality, and expounded with the confidence of 
fanaticism in the name of a science called Pos- 
itive. Here it is that we find the fixed and 
dominant idea that pervaded and compromised 
the whole life of M. Auguste Comte. Whoever 
did not accept his doctrine and his system, was 
for him either a retrogradist full of prejudice, 
or an ignoramus without scientific education, or 
an interested and jealous enemy. Whoever, on 
the other hand, lent himself to his views on any 
point, or for any time, however short, became 
in the eyes of M. Comte his conquest and his 
property, his philosophical serf, as it were, bound 
to his master by the tenure of duty, and the 
render of services from which he could never 
hope to enfranchise himself, without the risk of 
being treated upon the instant as a deserter or 
a rebel, and of seeing at once broken the closest 


and most approved bonds of intimacy and friend- 


276 POSITIVISM. 


ship. He had so entire a confidence in his own 
intellectual superiority, and in the rights which 
it conferred, that he expressed it sometimes with 
a néweté amounting almost to idolatry. One 
day, believing that he had won over to his ideas 
M. Armand Marrast, then the editor of the 
National, he wrote thus to his wife: “Marrast 
no longer feels any repugnance in admitting the 
indispensable fact of my intellectual superiority ; 
he 1s in this respect, in my opinion, especially 
influenced by Mill, whom he holds, and with 
reason, in high account. ‘To speak plainly and 
in general terms, I believe that, at the point at 
which I have now arrived, I have no occasion 
to do more than to continue to exist; the kind 
of preponderance which I covet cannot, hence- 
forth, fail to devolve upon me.” * 

Shortly after the date of this letter, M. Comte 
was separated from his wife and embroiled with 
Mr. Mill himself, who had not, as the former 


* Letter of the 8d December, 1842: “ Auguste Comte et la 
philosophie positive ;” p. 324. 


POSITIVISM. OT 


fancied, fulfilled toward him all the duties of 
an accepted and loyal disciple. 

I pass from the fixed idea of the man to the 
false idea of his system; it appears over and 
over again at each step in the “Cours de phi- 
losophie positive” of M. Auguste Comte,* and 
in the imposing biography consecrated to his 
memory by his most accomplished disciple, 
M. Littré.+ I extract from different parts of 
these volumes the passages in which the fun- 
damental doctrine is most clearly expressed : 

“Positive philosophy is the whole body of 
human knowledge. Human knowledge is the 
result of the study of the forces belonging to 
matter, and of the conditions or laws governing 
those forces,” t 

“The fundamental character of positive phi- 
losophy is, that it regards all phenomena as 


subjected to invariable natural laws, and con- 


*Six volumes 8vo., published in the interval from 1830 to 
1842 inclusive. 

t Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive. 8yo. 1868, 

t Ibid., p. 42, 


278 POSITIVISM. 


siders as absolutely viibaetein la to us, sit as 
having no sense for us, every inquiry into what 
is termed either primary or final causes.” * 

“The scientific path, in which I have, ever since 
I began to think, continued to walk, the labors 
that I obstinately pursue to elevate social theories 
to the rank of physical science are evidently, 
radically, and absolutely opposed to everything 
that has a religious or metaphysical tendency.” + 

“My positive philosophy is incompatible with 
every theological or metaphysical philosophy, 
and consequently equally so with every corre- 
sponding system of policy.” t 

“M. Comte,” says M. Littré, “made it a duty 
to speak im public without any reticence, to 
deduce his positive truths, and to confront them 
with the conceptions of Theology and of Meta- 
physics. . . . ‘Religiosity’ is in his eyes not 

*Cours de philosophic positive, by M. Auguste Comte 
vol. i, p. 14. 

+ Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive, by M. Littré, 


p. 194. 
{ Ibid., p. 210. 


fy 
ae & 


adh 


¥ 


* POSITIVISM. | 279 


only a Rexity: uh an avowal of want of | 
power.” * 

“The ‘positive state’ is that state of the 
mind in which it conceives that phenomena are 
governed by constant laws, from which prayer 
and adoration can demand nothing, but to 
which intelligence and science may address their 
demands; so that, by familiarizing himself with 
those laws more and more, and by conforming 
to them more and more, man acquires an ever- 
growing empire over nature and over himself, 
which empire is the sum of all civilization. The 
‘theological state,’ on the contrary, is that state 
of the mind which conceives that phenomena are 
the results of volition, or, if the social develop- 
ment has arrived at Monotheism, that they are 
the results of a single, all-wise, and all-power- 
ful will. This providence, essentially collective 
where Polytheism is supposed, essentially single 
in the case of Monotheism, governs the world, dis- 


penses its good and its evil, lays its finger upon 


* Auguste Comte et la phil. pos., by M. Littré, pp. 198-255. 


a 


280 - POSITIVISM. , ‘ 


human events, and regards the destiny of each 
individual man. Such is the contrast between 
the two doctrines. ... Profiting by the instruc. 
tion of the illustrious De Maistre, our French 
priests at last comprehended that ultramontan- 
ism was the only logical consequence deducible 
from their essential principles. The more the 
positive school defines the real character of its 
progress, the more must we see this retrograde 
concentration also develop itself; which will in- 
volve at some later epoch Deists themselves, 
as Positivism proceeds to gain complete ascend- 
ancy ; an ascendancy, in other respects, far more 
likely to be furthered than retarded by such co- 
ordination of its adversaries, for this will tend to 
give at last to the struggles of philosophy a de- 
cisive character; but the Positivists will alone 
succeed in prevailing (at least as far as specula- 
tive doctrines are concerned) over the coalition 
of all the philosophical forces of the ancient 
school, whether metaphysical or theological.” * 


* Auguste Comte et la phil. pos., by M. Littré, pp. 370, 434. 


; | POSITIVISM. 281 


M. Comte had even more aversion for Meta- 
physics than for Theology. He took particular 
offense at the contemporary spiritualistic school, 
and the scientific psychology of MM. Royer, 
Collard, Maine de Biran, Cousin, and J ouffroy: 
“In no view,” said he, “is there any room for 
this illusory psychology ; this final transforma: 
tion of a theology, which men strive, nowadays, 
so idly to reanimate; for—without troubling 
itself either with the physiological study of our 
intellectual organs, or with the observation of 
those rational processes, which in effect direct 
our different scientific researches—Psychology 
pretends to arrive at the discovery of the 
fundamental laws of the human mind by con- 
templating that very mind—that is to say, by 
making complete abstraction both of causes 
and of effects.” * 

Even while absolutely rejecting Theology, 
M. Comte treated it with more esteem than 


*Cours de philosophie positive, by M. Auguste Comte, 
vol. i, p. 34. 


282 POSITIVISM,  - 


Metaphysics. “We are,” he said, “too dis- 
posed, nowadays, to ignore the immense bene- 
fits due to religious influence. The positive 
philosophy, however paradoxical it may be to 
claim for it such a peculiarity, is virtually the 
only philosophy capable of worthily appre- 
ciating all the participation of the spirit of 
religion in the whole grand development of 
humanity. Is it not directly evident that, as 
by an invincible organic necessity, moral efforts 
have almost always to combat to some degree 
or other the most energetic impulses of our 
nature; the theological spirit was imperatively 
called upon to furnish to social discipline that 
general basis which was quite indispensable at 
a time when human foresight, whether of men 
in masses or of men as individuals, was certain- 
ly far too limited to offer any sufficient point 
@apput to influences purely rational?” 

. “When the positive philosophy shall 
have acquired that character of universality 
which it is still without, it will be capable of 


POSITIVISM. 2838 


replacing entirely, with all its native superior- 
ity, that theological philosophy and that meta- 
physical philosophy of which this universality is 
in these days the sole real peculiarity, and 
which, deprived of this motive for preference, 
will have for our successors nothing but an his- 
torical existence.” * 

I do not pause to notice in how many respects 
this language is superficial, confused, and inco- 
herent. I only draw attention to the funda- 
mental idea which it manifests—matter, the 
forces of matter, and its laws; these are the 
sole objects of human knowledge, the sole 
domain of the human mind. Aware of, and 
embarrassed by the objections which the idea 
has from the beginning of time excited, M. Lit- 
tré has striven to rid himself of them by an 
admission, sincere no doubt, like everything that 
he thinks, and everything that he says, but full 
in its turn of confusion and incoherence. “The 


* Cours de philosophie positive, by M. Comte, vol. v, p. 73; 
vol. i, p. 23, 


284 POSITIVISM. 


positive philosophy,” says he, “is at once a 
system which comprehends all that is known 
of the world of man and of society, and also a 
general method, containing in itself all the ways 
by which men have come to learn all these 
things. What is beyond, whether, materially 
speaking, that space without limit, or intel- 
lectually that concatenation of never-ending 
causes, all this is absolutely inaccessible to the 
human mind. By inaccessible is not meant 
null or non-existent. Immensity in matter, as 
in intellect, is connected by a close band with 
what we know, and it is only by such an alli- 
ance that it becomes an idea positive in itself, 
and of the same order; what I mean is, that by 
so touching and bordering what we know, im- 
mensity appears under the double character of 
reality and of inaccessibility. It is an ocean 
which dashes upon our shores, and for which we 
have nor bark nor sail, but the clear vision of 
which is as salutary as it is formidable.” * 


* Auguste Comte et la phil. pos., by M. Littré, p. 519. 


POSITIVISM. 285 


The vision so admitted by M. Littré is not 
clear, and neither is it salutary; but vague, and 
without result. The imagery does not destroy 
the system which it seeks to vail from us. 
Every religious belief, every spiritual doctrine, 
God and the human soul, are discarded by 
Positivism, and treated as arbitrary and trans- 
itory hypotheses, which, however they may 
have conduced to the development of humanity, 
ought now to be rejected by human reason, just 
as the foot may throw down the ladder which 
has enabled it to mount to the summit. To 
call things by their proper names, Positivism is 
Materialism and Atheism, .with more or less 
explicitness, confidently or hesitatingly, accepted 
as the last term of human science, and when 
hard pressed, taking refuge in the darkness of 
skepticism. 

What are the foundations upon which 
Positivism rests? What facts, what proofs, 
does M. Auguste Comte adduce in support of 


his principles, that matter, its forces, and its 


286 POSITIVISM. 


laws, constitute the sole object of human knowl- 
edge, the sole domain of the human mind ? 

He appeals to two arguments—the one meta- 
physical, the other historical; the one derived 
from the mind of man itself, the other from the 
history of humanity. | 

I cannot here follow M. Comte in his long 
and complex explanation of the two orders of 
proofs to which he appeals in support of his 
system; what I shall say will, I think, suffice to 
demonstrate that neither can stand any serious © 
examination. 

As a metaphysician—for metaphysician he 
must permit himself to be called, since he 
makes use of metaphysics, whatever his antip- 
athy for philosophers who bear that name ;— 
as metaphysician, I repeat, M. Auguste Comte 
belongs to the sensualistic school. He thinks 
with Locke and Condillac, that man deduces all 
his ideas and all his knowledge from impres- 
sions received by him from the outer world, 


and from the reflections which he makes upon 


POSITIVISM. 287 


those impressions. He takes, therefore, as his 
starting point, the maxim of that school which 
proclaims that “there is nothing in the intel- 
ligence which has not first been in the sense.” 
Nevertheless, whether by an act of proper and 
remarkable sagacity, or struck by the reply of 
Leibnitz, “unless the intelligence itself” he 
admits that sensation does not account for all 
that passes and develops itself in the mind of 
the observer of the external world. “If” he 
says, “on the one side every positive theory 
must necessarily be founded upon observation, 
it is, on the other side, equally plain that to 
apply itself to the task of observation, our mind 
has need of some ‘theory.’ If, in contemplating 
the phenomena, we do not immediately attach 
them to certain principles, not only would it 
be impossible for us to combine these isolated 
observations, so as to draw any fruit therefrom ; 
but we should be entirely incapable of retain- 
ing them, and in most cases the facts would 


remain before our eyes unnoticed. The need at 


é 

288° : POSITIVISM. 

all times of some ‘theory’ whereby to associate 
facts, combined with the evident impossibility 
of the human mind at its origin forming 
‘theories’ out of observations, is a fact which it 
_ 1s impossible to ignore.” * 

This fact, thus proved by M. Comte himself; 
this necessary part of the human mind, indis- 
_ pensable to enable it to acquire knowledge of 
_ the external world; this “theory,” anterior to all 
observation, which man requires for the purpose 
himself of observing, what are they else than 
those universal and necessary principles pro- 
claimed by the spiritualistic school, and to 
which I recently referred ?—principles inherent 
in the human mind, which it applies as from its 
own stores in taking cognizance of the external 
world, and by virtue of which, just as one 
mounts a river up to its source, man mounts 
and mounts up to God, and up to the relations 
of man with God. 


* Cours de philosophie positive, par M. Auguste Comte, vol, 
i. p. 8 


POSITIVISM. 289 


But, admitting the same fact, M. Comte does 
not explain itin thisway. This“ theory ;” these 
principles anterior to external observation, and 
which the mind absolutely requires in order to 
be able to observe, are, according to him, pure 
inventions of the human mind itself, temporary | 
instruments which the mind creates and employs 
in its labors until it can obtain better. “Be. 
tween,” says he, “two difficulties, pressed on 
the one hand by the necessity of observing 
in order to form ‘theories,’ and on the other 
by the no less imperious necessity of creating 
‘theories’ in order to be able to deliver it 
self up to a series of coherent observations, the 
human mind at its birth would find itself shut 
in by a vicious circle from which it would never 
have had any means of escaping, had it not suc. 
ceeded in opening a natural issue by the spon- 
taneous development of theological conceptions, 
which presented a point to which his efforts 
might be concentrated, and which might furnish 


aliment for his activity. It is, In effect, very 
19 


7 


290 POSITIVISM. 


remarkable, that questions the most radically 
inaccessible to our capacities, the intimate nature 
of being, the origin and the end of all phe- 
nomena, should be precisely those which the 
intelligence propounds to itself, as of paramount 
importance in that primitive condition, all the 
other problems really admittmg of solution 
being almost regarded as unworthy of serious 
meditation. ‘The reason of this it is not difficult 
to discover, for experience alone could have 
given us the measure of our strength; and if 
man had not begun by entertaining an exag- 
gerated opinion of that strength, it would never 
have been capable of acquiring all the develop- 
ment of which it is susceptible. So much does 
our organization exact.” * 

, Strange error of a man, whose supreme pre- 
tension it is to found all human knowledge 
upon the observation of facts! At his very 
first step, at the first difficulty which he 


t= 


* Cours de philosophie positive, par M. Auguste Comte, vol. 
i, pp. 9, 10. 


POSITIVISM. 291 


encounters, M. Comte observes inexactly and 
incompletely, does not see in the facts all that 
the facts contain, and only explains them by 
assigning to the human mind, in its primitive 
and spontaneous operations, a hypothesis, the 
hypothesis of “theological conceptions.” God, 
and man’s relations with God, is a human inven- 
tion, destined to support man at the commence- 
ment of his career as an intelligent being, and 
to occupy provisionally the place of science! 

The source of this misapprehension, the 
capital error of Positivism in its metaphysical 
argument, is, that it ignores the nature and the | 
limits of science. 

The famous “enthyméme” of Descartes, “I 
think, therefore I am,” is a pleonasm. As soon 
as the human being says to itself “I,” the 
human being affirms its own existence, and 
distinguishes itself from that external world 
whence it derives impressions of which it is not 
the author. In this primary fact are revealed 


_ the two primary objects of human knowledge: 


292 POSITIVISM. 


on the one side the human being himself, 
the individual person that feels and pérceives, 
that feels himself and perceives himself; on the 
other side, the external world that is felt and 
perceived: the subject and the object, (the moz 
and the non-mot.) Such is the twofold field, at 
the beginning of his intellectual existence, 
opened to the knowing faculty of man. 

In each of these fields, whether the human 
being makes himself or whether he makes the 
external world the object of his contemplation, 
he proceeds by the same method; he considers 
particular facts, classes these under more 
general facts which serve as their summary, and 
recognizes laws that govern them, these laws 
being themselves facts, When this method of 
observation and of generalization is applied to 
the outer world, understanding by that world 
the human body also, it gives birth to the 
sciences of physics and of physiology. "When 
such method is applied to the human being, 
regarded as distinct from the body in which he 


POSITIVISM. 293 


lives and by which he acts, it gives birth to the 
science of psychology, logic, and morals. It is 
not here my intention to propose a classification 
of the sciences, but only to determine the 
domain of science properly so called—that is to 
say, the field in which the human mind by 
observation gets directly at facts and at the 
laws of facts. 

Philosophers, in their study of man and of 
the world, do not sufficiently consult language, 
the general language, the common language, 
that instinctive expression of the activity of the 
human mind. I interrogate our native lan- 
guage upon the question which now occupies 
me, and I find it reflecting the greatest light. 
It has, to express the results of the intellectual 
process which takes place in man, when 
regarded as the spectator of the universe and of 
himself, many different words: “ connaitre,” 
“savoir,” “croire,” “connaissance,” “ science,” 
“ croyance,” “foi.” These are not mere different 


names to express the same idea and the same 


294 POSITIVISM. 


fact, they are signs of different facts and of 
diverse states of the human soul. If we inter- 
rogate the languages of civilized nations, ancient 
or modern, we find in all of them, with more or 
less abundance, precision or subtilty, a similar 
variety of terms corresponding to a similar 
diversity of facts. 

Talleyrand said once in the chamber of Peers, 
“There is somebody who has more intellect 
than Napoleon, more intellect than Voltaire; 
that somebody is the Public.” I also say, there 
is a more profound observer than Bacon, a 
greater philosopher than Kant; it is mankind. 
Mankind is right when it distinguishes in its 
languages knowledge from science and from 
belief, science from belief and from faith. Bos- 
suet wrote a book entitled “De la Connais- 
sance de Dieu et de soi-méme;” the idea would 
never have occurred to him of entitling it “De 
la science de Dieu et de soi-méme;” it would 
have shocked his good sense as much as his 
piety. The child believes the smile and the 


POSITIVISM. 295 


speech of its mother; in its belief there is cer- 
tainly no scientific appreciation (no science) of 
the relations which unite it to its mother, and 
of the reasons which make it believe in her. 
Knowledge, science, belief, and faith, are facts — 
essentially distinct, although all equally natural 
to the human soul; and it is impossible to con- 
found them, to take one for the other, to annul 
one in favor of the other, or to attempt to 
reduce them to one term, without ignoring 
realities, and falling into enormous errors. 

Such has been the constant error of M. 
Auguste Comte, and such is the radical vice of 
Positivism. M. Comte ignores the natural and 
permanent diversity in the intellectual states 
through which a man may pass in his ardent 
pursuit of truth. He refuses here to recognize 
any state as legitimate and definitive except the 
scientific state. He regards intuitive knowl. 
edge and instinctive belief as preparatory and 
transitory states, states without any rational 


authority; as, in short, simple steps on the way 


296 POSITIVISM, 


to that scientific state which alone sets man in 
possession of the truth. Positivism is thus led 
to extend the pretensions of science beyond its 
proper domain, that is, beyond the finite world, 
its facts and its laws; and as science finds itself 
incapable of observing and of defining infinity, 
Positivism is, perforce, reduced either to deny 
infinity, or to declare infinity absolutely inacces- 
sible to the human mind, and so to pass it over 
in silence, 

This negation discovers another immense 
error of the school and of its chief. Convinced, 
and with reason, that the observation of facts is 
the natural and constant process of the human 
understanding in its labor after knowledge, 
M. Auguste Comte has ill understood, and 
incompletely understood, the results of this 
labor. He failed to perceive that it was ob- 
servation itself, carried on and accomplished by 
the process, no less natural and no less legiti- 
mate, of induction, which was revealing to the 


mind its peculiar facts and its peculiar laws, 


-_ 7 
POSITIVISM. 297 


as well as the facts and the laws of the external 
world, within which that mind is placed. 
M. Comte ended by ignoring or denying the 
elements @ priort of human knowledge; that 
is to say, the universal and necessary principles 
by which man raises himself to God, and has 
relations with God. Thus M. Comte mutilates 
the human mind, because he fails to observe it 
and to recognize it in its entirety. 

He is impelled by his system to another and 
still more serious mutilation of human nature. 
After having declared matter, its forces and its 
laws, to be the single object of human knowl- 
edge, and these laws to be inherent in matter, 
eternal and invariable, what is to be said of 
human liberty? What place is to be assigned 
to human liberty in this world, in which it is 
powerless to create anything or to change any- 
thing, and in which there exists no power from 
which it can demand anything or obtain any- 
thing? Evidently, m such a system human 


liberty is a chimera, an idle luxury of human 


298 POSITIVISM. 


nature; man, with all his faculties, has nothing 
to do but to study matter carefully, its forces 
and its laws, to adapt himself to them, and to 
make the best use he can of them, with a view 
to his welfare and to the satisfaction of his 
desires. Fatalism iy the law of man as of the 
world within which he lives! 

The moral instincts, and the naturally lofty 
mind of M. Comte revolted at this consequence, 
although it flowed imperiously from his system. 
The respect which he felt for the method of 
observation, and for the facts which it attains 
to, did not permit him absolutely to ignore 
or expressly to deny the psychological fact of 
man’s liberty. Sometimes he attempts to find 
it a place in that sum of external facts and 
fixed laws which is, in his opinion, the sole 
field for man’s activity and for man’s science. 
But such is the want of coherence of idea, that 
M. Comte is visibly embarrassed ; consequently, 
in his works—more especially in his “Cours de 


philosophie positive,”—the most solid and con- 


POSITIVISM. 299 


sistent of all his writings in its fundamental 
principles—he sets almost completely aside the 
essential fact of human liberty, and of free will 
in the individual man; and in those books in 
which he treats of social organization, when he 
finds himself face to face with the wants and 
the rights of political liberty, that natural 
consequence of individual free will and of the 
responsibility attaching to it, he struggles to 
elude questions of this kind, feeling the impos- 
sibility of reconciling the principle of moral 
order with the despotism and the fatalism of 
the material world; and when he explains his 
views as to the government of human societies, 
it 1s easy to see that, although writing “I am, 
head and heart Republican,”* he is, in his 
dreams, rather substituting a scientific domina- 
tion for a theocratic domination than instituting 
any liberal régume. 

After metaphysics comes history. M. Comte 
appeals to the annals of all nations and all ages 


* Auguste Comte et la phil. pos., by M. Littré, p. 251, 


300 POSITIVISM. 


in confirmation of his system of the world and 
of humanity. This history is to be divided, 
according to him, into three successive states, 
the theological state, the metaphysical state, 
and the scientific state. In the theological state 
and epoch, the human mind and social institu- 
tions are under the empire of pretended super- 
natural powers, of several such or of only one 
such, invented by man for the solution of the 
natural problems which lay siege to man, and 
for the determination of the laws, with which 
the social order cannot dispense. In the meta- 
physical epoch and state, vain abstractions 
essay to replace the supernatural powers of the 
theological state, and only end in an anarchy, 
both of opinions and society. The third epoch 
is destined to be the reign of positive science, 
founded solely upon observation and respect for 
the facts, the forces, and the laws of that extern- 
al world which is the theater of man’s exist- 
ence. The first two states are, according to him, 


essentially irrational and transitory, They are 


POSITIVISM. 301 


the first steps of that which M. Comte styles 
the grand evolution of humanity, of which the 
régume of science is the end and the summit. 

It would be difficult more entirely to deform, 
difficult to show greater ignorance of man’s 
general history. That which M. Comte regards 
as three successive states in the history of the 
human race is only the complex and permanent — 
condition of humanity, agitated by movements 
swaying in different directions, according as it 
meets with the successes or encounters the re- 
verses, the hopes, or the fears to which different 
nations and generations are subject. That theo- 
logical conceptions and metaphysical meditations 
are only transitory facts, “which,” according to 
the expression of M. Comte, “will have hence- 
forth only an historical existence,” is an assertion 
no more true of such facts than of those that 
the study of physics supplies. These different 
yearnings of the mind, and their different labors, 
are the very essence—the indestructible and 


indivisible essence—of human nature. At no 


302 POSITIVISM. 


time and in no country have men more ceased, 
or will they more cease, to pray to God, and to 
strive to comprehend him, than they will cease 
to study the physical world, and to make it 
subserve their interests. Nations and genera- 
tions of individuals, in different ages, have 
advanced more or less in one or other of these 
careers of intellectual activity; and so they will 
continue to advance. Religious faith, meta- 
physical meditation, and scientific inquiry have 
their alternations of enthusiasm and of languor, 
of glory and of sterility ; they appear and they 
prosper, sometimes separately, sometimes simul- 
taneously. If India plunged herself deep 
among the symbols of mythology and amid 
the void of Pantheism, Greece cultivated with 
like success the metaphysical and the natural 
sciences—Aristotle was the contemporary of 
Plato. Where other nations fluctuated variously 
between theological conceptions, metaphysical 
abstractions, and scientific studies, the Hebrew 


people continued, in the theological state, Mon- 


POSITIVISM. 303 


otheists. In the sixteenth century, when the 
spirit of free inquiry and of independence was 
awakened, and made its influence felt far and 
wide, Christian faith, at the same time, was 
resuscitated and. confirmed; and the eighteenth 
century founded at once the political liberty of 
Protestant England and the philosophical and 
literary glory of Catholic France. The human 
mind has, according to time and place, its 
favorite labors and its favorite impulses; but 
it subsists always one and entire; it never 
renounces any one of its grand hopes or of its — 
grand operations; and those men strangely 
mutilate and debase it who represent the mind 
as having, during ages, lost itself in the vain 
effort to atta a knowledge of God and of its 
own nature, and who condemn it henceforth to 
take up its quarters in the science of matter— . 
of its forces—of its laws. ’ 
Why need I appeal to history for a proof of 
the simultaneous and ‘ndestructible co-exist- 


ence of these different conditions of humanity, 


304 POSITIVISM. 


among which M. Auguste Comte refuses to ad- 
mit more than one as rational and definitive ? 
M. Comte has himself undertaken—he alone— 
to furnish me with this proof. This intractable 
adversary of all religious belief and tendency 
could not, even for the short space of this life, 
himself remain indifferent to such belief and 
tendency ; during this brief period he traversed, 
and in the inverse order of his own theories, 
each of the different intellectual states which 
he had assigned as the successive stages of the 
human race. He had placed the theological 
state at the beginning and the scientific state 
at the close of the career of humanity; after 
having made his own début by the scientific 
state, it was as impossible for him, as it is for 
the human race, to content himself with that, 
and he himself ended there, where, according to 
him, mankind had commenced, namely, with 
the theological state. He had declared his 
positive philosophy to be “in radical and abso- 


lute contradiction to every kind of religious or 


POSITIVISM. 305 


metaphysical tendency.” He had separated 
with éclat from the Saint-Simonians, “for they 
will soon,” he said, “ sink themselves in ridicule 
and contempt. Only imagine, their heads are 
turned to such a degree, that they propose noth- 
ing less than the establishment of a real, new 
religion, a sort of incarnation of the divinity in 
the person of Saint-Simon.”* And some years 
after holding this language, and while still in 
the plenitude of bodily vigor and thought, 
M. Comte in his turn launched into a theolog- 
ical career; he took it upon him to transform 
Positivism into a religion. By the most violent 
of all personified abstractions, he made out of 
humanity the great being, the real being, sov- 
ereign and adorable, and he placed that being 
in the place of God, declaring himself at the 
same time to be his chief priest. He had more 


than once proclaimed that all religion was 


* Letter of the 9th December, 1828, to M. Gustave d’Eich- 
thal. Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive, by M. Littré, 


p. 173. 
20 


306 POSITIVISM. 


essentially founded upon the supernatural; 
and yet a religion all natural—the religion of 
humanity, the worship of humanity, the church 
of humanity, were summoned by him to suc 
ceed to the Christian religion and to the Church 
of Christ. On the 19th of October, 1851, when 
terminating his third philosophical course on 
the general histories of humanity, M. Comte 
summed it up in these words: “In the name of 
the past and of the future, the theoretical servi- 
tors and the practical servitors of humanity are 
about to assume worthily the direction of the 
general affairs of this world, in order to con- 
struct, at last, the true providence, moral, intel- 
lectual, and material, at the same time excluding 
irrevocably from political supremacy all the 
different slaves of God—Catholics, Protestants, 
or Deists—as being at once in arrear of the age 
and its perturbators.” The positivist religion 
thus proclaimed, a positivist catechism and a 
positivist calendar—these last both composed 


by M. Comte—reduced his principles to practice. 


POSITIVISM. 807 


In a series of conversations between “The 
Priest and the Woman,” the catechism first 
establishes and explains the dogma, then the 
worship, of the new religion, its internal order 
and its external order, its private worship and 
its public worship. And the calendar, by a 
retrospective chronology, determines for any 
given year of thirteen months, and for the seven 
days of the week, the names of the grand servi- 
tors in every department of humanity, who are 
to replace the Christian saints: three hundred 
and sixty-four names, men and women, with one 
hundred and sixty-five additional names, are in- 
scribed upon this list, which begins with Moses 
and ends with Bichat, passing through Homer, 
Aristotle, Archimedes, Cxesar, Saint Paul, Char. 
lemagne, Dante, Gutenburg, Shakspeare, Des- 
cartes, and Frederic the Second! 

A chaos is a sorry sight; a chaos of the soul 
a still sorrier spectacle than a chaos of worlds! 
Epochs of moral and social crises, even while 


they bring on and prepare for mankind eras of 


308 POSITIVISM. 


mighty progress, throw also great and potent 
intellects into chaos. Under the seduction of a 
noble ambition, and the delusion of a partial 
success, they enthusiastically attach themselves 
to some special subject, some incomplete idea ; 
vain of their shallow and confused systems, or 
rather of the brilliant coloring in which they 
invest them, they pretend to explain and regu- 
late man and the world, and yet are nothing 
more than their superficial and presumptuous 
observers. Among these “great lost ones of 
humanity,” (I borrow a phrase of their own,) 
M. Comte was one of the most disinterested 
and the most sincere. The sincerity and the 
courage evinced by him in expressing his con- 
victions led him on from inconsequence to in- 
consequence ; in his benighted course he caught 
glimpses occasionally of grand ideas, and of 
these he apprehended neither the scope nor the 
connection: first it was an idea of a science ex- 
cluding all idea of religion; and then a certain 


idea of a religion reconciled with and intimately 


POSITIVISM. ~ 309 


united with the idea of science; turn by turn 
he gave himself up to the one and to the other 
with a blind and a daring devotedness. Had 
he appeared in Greece at the great era of 
philosophy, or in France in the seventeenth 
century, in the midst of the great Christian 
controversy, he would have been taxed with 
insanity—at the one epoch, not only by Plato 
but by Aristotle; at the other, not only by 
Bossuet but by Spinoza. In our days he 
has been more fortunate: he attached himself 
passionately to the method of observation of 
facts, which is the very character of science, 
and although his observations were superficial, 
inexact, and incomplete—although he fell into 
the strangest inconsistencies—the fundamental 
principle of his system, and the coincidence of 
his primary ideas with the method and the tend- 
ency of the physical sciences, the darling study 
of our age, have given him more importance 


and more influence than were really his due. 


FIFTH MEDITATION. 


PAN THEISM. 


No two essays at philosophy are more dissim- 
uar—I should indeed say more contradictory 
—than Pantheism and Positivism. What Posi- 
tivism declares to be impossible, Pantheism 
seeks to accomplish; what Positivism forbids 
man to seek, Pantheism promises to give him. 
It is the fundamental principle of Positivism to 
confine the human mind to the finite world, its 
facts and its laws; Pantheism aspires at a 
knowledge and a comprehension of Infinity, and 
of the relations of the finite with Infinity. “I 
have explained God, God’s nature and his 


attributes,” says Spinoza.* 


* Ethics, 1st part; of God: Appendix, vol. i, p. 39. French 
translation by M. Saisset. 


PANTHEISM. 314 


I hasten to explain, in order to prevent mis- 
construction; it is to Pantheism, properly so 
called—to the sole system that merits the name 
—that my remarks are here applicable. “We 
must,” says M. Cousin, “it seems, distinguish 
two kinds of Pantheism. The assertion that 
this visible universe, indefinite or infinite, 
suffices to itself, and that there is nothing 
to be sought for beyond, is the Pantheism of 
Diderot, Helvetius, de la Mettrie, d’Holbach. © 
This Pantheism is clearly Atheism, and it 
would not be very easy to comprehend the 
complacent indulgence that should spare it that. 
name of Atheism—a name, unfortunately, of 
ancient date, which would then have no longer 
any object to fit it, and would need to be erased 
from our dictionary. But is it possible for a 
similar Pantheism to be imputed to Spinoza? 
With the French Encyclopedists, things exist 
in particularity and individuals singly: the 
universe is an assemblage of individuals—an 


assemblage without unity, or of which the sole 


312 PANTHEISM. 


unity is a presumed primary matter, which the 
philosopher admits or which he does not admit, 
but with which his thought has no business to 
occupy itself. With Spinoza, on the contrary, 
the single substance is all, and the individuals 
are nothing. This substance is not the nominal 
unity of the assemblage of individuals, each of 
which exists singly, but is the smgle really 
existing substance, and in the presence of that 
substance the world and man are but shadows; 
so that from the ‘Ethics’ may be gathered an 
exaggerated Theism which leaves no individual 
existing as such. Rigorously, and at bottom, 
there is here perhaps only one and the same 
system, but a system, nevertheless, with two 
very different forms—the one, where God is 
nothing but the Universe; the other, where the 
Universe exists only in God.” * 

I think, with M. Cousin, that, rigorously and 
at bottom, there is here but one and the same 
system, but in appearance, and I say besides, in 


* Histoire générale de la philosophie, p. 433, ed. 1863. 


PANTHEISM. 313 


the opinion of its authors, the difference is 
great, and requires to be noticed. I postpone 
for the subject “ Materialism,” all that I have to 
say upon the subject of the so-called Pantheism, 
which admits no other existence than either 
that of the individualities that people the 
visible universe, or that of the primary matter 
whence they have issued. I occupy myself, at 
this moment, solely with the idealistic Pan- 
theism. 

Do we wish to behold a spectacle of how 
weak the human mind really is in the midst of 
all its grandeur, and of the limits which must 
finally and abruptly check its progress, however 
high its flight, we will read Plotinus, Spinoza, 
and Hegel, three martyrs to intellectual ambi- 
tion, differing very much according to the 
difference of the eras and the nations to which © 
they respectively belong, but similar in this 
point at least, that they ignore the visible 
world, and leave it behind them, to enter that 
world which dazzles their sight, where they 


314 PANTHEISM. 


plunge into a void in quest of what they call 
“ Being !” 

Two passions have impelled, are impelling, 
and will, probably, still occasionally impel men 
of eminent powers of mind to Pantheism: the 
passionate craving for an universal science, and 
the passionate longing for universal unity— 
feelings noble both, but illegitimate and inca- 
pable of satisfaction. 

“T have resolved,” said Spinoza, “to search if | 
there exist a real Good, a Good capable, singly, 
of filling the entire soul after it shall have re- 
jected all the rest—in a word, a Good that 
gives the soul, when the soul finds it and pos- 
sesses it, the eternal and supreme happiness. 
. . . Man is essentially a being that thinks, and 
the highest degree of human knowledge ought 
to be the highest degree of human felicity. . . . 
My sources of enjoyment consist in the exercise 
of the reason.” * 


* (Euvres de Spinoza, French translation of M. Emile Saisset, 
vol. i, pp. 15, 16. 


PANTHEISM. 315 


What obliviousness of man’s nature and of 
man’s life! Man is not merely a being that 
thinks, but a being that feels, wills, and acts, 
a being moral and responsible for his acts, at 
the same time that he is a beg of intelligence, 
and a being insatiate of knowledge. It is by 
his thought that he accounts to himself for his 
sentiments, and for the motives of his acts, but 
it is not from his thought that he derives either 
his sentiments or his liberty, neither does knowl- 
edge constitute his sole enjoyment. Spinoza 
mutilates man strangely when he places “the 
highest degree of human felicity in the highest 
degree of human knowledge.” Man is more 
exacting than the philosopher, and it requires 
infinitely more to satisfy the most modest 
human soul than to satisfy the proudest mind. 
Infinitely more in respect of happiness, infinitely 
less in respect of science! Not that I would 
make their intellectual ambition a reproach to 
philosophers, even when it leads them astray. 


It is an honor to the human mind that it 


316 PANTIHEISM. 


aspires higher than it can attain, that it 
torments itself in the struggle to carry its 
science into that invisible world, which it in- 
stinctively feels by anticipation, just as it does 
into that visible world that it sees. God 
eranted to man this privilege; he implanted in 
his soul the ardent desire to know him and to 
possess him fully. But at the same time, God 
eranted to men in general certain instincts and 
spontaneous beliefs which adequately satisfy 
this desire without the necessity of any 
profound study. What would have become 
of the human race if, in order to believe in 
God, to hope in him, and to pray to him, man 
had been obliged to wait until philosophers 
had resolved the problems which still weigh 
upon their genius? As God, in creating man 
free, took care that the maintenance of the gen- 
eral order in this world should not be completely 
abandoned to the disputes of men, so did he 
provide for the spiritual nourishment of man- 


kind, without denying to the great ambitious 


PANTHEISM. 317 


ones of the earth either the prospect of a satisfac- 
tion more complete, or the right to search for it. 

Let us never tire of repeating, this is the 
mystery of man’s mixed nature—an indication 
of a destiny in store for him superior to his 
actual condition. He carries within him the 
ideas of infinity, of perfection, and yet here 
below he is nothing but a finite being, 1mper- 
fect, equally incapable of sufficing to himself 
and of satisfying himself, either in the domain 
of thought or of actual life. “There are more 
things in heaven and upon earth than philoso- 
phy—than even the philosophy ‘of the absolute’ 
—can explain. .. . Tocomprehend God, it needs 
to be God. A child might have said as much to 
Hegel.” These words I borrow from M. Edmond 
Scherer’s exposition of the doctrine of Hegel.* 
Jesus in effect said, eighteen centuries ago: “I 
praise thee, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, 
that thou hast hidden these things from the wise 


and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.” 


* Mélanges Vhistoire religicuse, pp. 366, 341. 1864. 


318 | PANTHEISM. 


Pantheists are entirely of the opinion of 
M. Scherer, for to enable man to comprehend 
God, they have found no other expedient than 
to make of man himself the God that man is 
desirous of comprehending. The passion for 
an universal science has ended by receiving no 
being as God but man. isi 

The passion for universal unity has led to 
the same result. That truth is one—that is to 
say, that all truths, whatever their object, are 
in harmony with one another—the very word 
truth implies and proclaims. From the unity 
of truth the Pantheists passed, with a single 
bound, to the unity of bemg. They identified 
idea and reality, science and existence, con- 
founding all things in order to reduce them to 
one single thing, and abolishing all beings in 
order to concentrate them all in one and the 
same being, which, after all, is nothing more 
than an impersonal notion and a barren name, 
falling in its turn into the void. 

By what path did the Pantheists arrive at 


PANTHEISM. 319 


this abyss? What was the process employed 
by men of eminent powers of mind to con- 
struct a system so singularly factitious and 
hypothetical, and yet pretending, at the same 
time, to be so necessary and so rigorously 
philosophical ? 

Like some great men of antiquity, (and their 
number is considerable,) who sought to explain 
nature and the physical world by incomplete 
and precipitate hypotheses and systems, in- 
vented irrespectively of either facts or their 
laws, the Pantheists by similar means pro- 
ceeded—nay, are proceeding—to explain man, 
the universe, and God; the Infinite and the 
finite. The method which for three centuries 
has constituted the glory of the natural sciences, 
and made their progress lasting, the exact study 
of facts and their relations; that method so long 
strange not only to general philosophy but to 
the special sciences themselves—I may at once 
call it by its proper name, the scientific method 


—was formerly, and remains still, strange to 


320 PANTHEISM. 


the Pantheists ; to Spinoza as to Plotinus, to 
Hegel as to Spinoza. Whether Plotinus 
plunges into an ecstacy to arrive at and com- 
prehend God in uniting man to God by the 
virtue of contemplation; or Spinoza, defining 
substance, makes it the principle from which to 
deduce his theory of the universe and of its 
unity; or Hegel, speaking of dea in order to 
arrive at the same result as Spinoza, seeks to 
obtain from his term substance—it is the same 
defect that appears in the labors of all these 
potent intelligences, not only in their develop- 
ment, but in the very point from which they 
start; for observation of facts and of their laws 
they substitute the affirmation and the defint- 
tion of an axiom, and the deduction, logical, 
it is true, of its consequences. They disdain 
and set aside all study of the realities of the 
universe, believing themselves to be in posses- 
sion of a key to open its secrets. 

They see not that their key is a deception, 
that at each step facts evident, indestructible, 


PANTHEISM. O21 


_give the flattest denial to their inferences, and 
that to maintain their arbitrary and insufficient 
principle they are forced to ignore and to deny 
other facts, themselves evident, indestructible. 

Psychological observation proves and irresist- 
ibly establishes three facts, however the conse- 
quences of these facts themselves may lead to 
questions and controversies. 

1. Man believes in his own existence, and in 
his own personality. He feels himself and per- 
ceives himself to be a being, real and distinct 
from every other being. 

9. Man feels himself and knows himself to be 
a free agent. Of the freedom of his resolves, 
whatever the motives and deliberations which 
precede them, man has an intimate and assured 
consciousness. 

8. Good and evil exist in man, and exist in 
the world; moral good and evil as well as phys- 
ical good and evil, Whatever may be thought 
of their origin, the mixture and the struggle of 


good and of evil, in the moral order and in the 
21 


322 PANTHEISM. 


_ physical order, are facts evident in themselves, 
and attested by the conscience and by the ex- 
perience of the human race. i 
Pantheism sometimes ignores and omits, | 
sometimes formally denies, these facts, which 
psychology attests and proves. There is, how- 
ever, a notable difference in this point in 
the three great representatives of Pantheism. 
Thanks to the Platonic school, from which he 
sprang, Plotinus, in treating the different ques- 
tions of man’s liberty and of the reality of good 
and of evil, soars in an elevated region where 
the truth now shines in splendor, now obscures 
itself and disappears in the labyrinth in which 
the philosopher himself is entangled as soon as 
he attempts to explain the one and _ infinite 
Being and that Being’s relations with, nature 
and with man. Spinoza is more consequent and 
plainer. He formally denies all individuality, 
all human liberty. Substance, “the being,” is 
single and universal. All act of man, as every 


fact of nature, is produced by fated laws and 


PANTHEISM. 323 


causes: “Free will is a chimera, flattering to 
our pride and in reality founded upon our igno- 
rance. All that I can say to those who believe 
that they can, by virtue of any free decision of 
the soul, speak or be silent—or, to use a single 
word, act—is that they dream with their eyes 
open.”* . .. “Nothing,” adds he, “is bad in 
itself, Good and evil indicate nothing positive 
in things considered in themselves, and are 
nothing but manners of thinking. Not only 
has every man the right to seek his good, his 
pleasure, but he cannot do otherwise... . The 
measure of each man’s right is his power. . . . 
He who does not yet know reason, or who, hav- 
ing not as yet contracted the habit of virtue, 
lives according to the laws only of his appetites, 
is as much in his right as he who regulates his 
life according to the laws of reason. In other 
words, just as the sage has an absolute right to 


do all that his reason dictates to him, or to live 


*(Euyres de Spinoza, French translation of M. E. Saisset, 
vol. i, Introduction, p. clii. 


a 


324 PANTHEISM. 


according to the laws of his reason, in the same 
manner has the ignorant man and the madman 
a right to everything that his appetite impels 
him to take; in other words, the right to live 
according to the laws of appetite... . And he 
is no more obliged to live according to the laws 
of good sense than a cat is obliged to live under 
the laws that govern the nature of a lion.... 
Hence we conclude that a compact has only a 
value proportioned to its utility; where the 
utility disappears the compact disappears too 
with it, and loses all its authority. There is, 
then, folly in pretending to bind a man for- 
ever to his word; unless, at least, man so 
contrive that the breach of the compact shall 
entail for him that violates it more danger 
than profit.” * 

Hegel is less absolute and less blind. Of a 
mind large, and from its greatness naturally 
just, he escaped at moments the yoke of his 
system. Struck by the particular truths, moral, 


* CEuvres de Spinoza, vol. i, pp. clix, clx. 


PANTHEISM. 395 


historical, zsthetic, that offered themselves to 
his view in the theater of the universe, he ad- 
mitted them without very well knowing what 
place he should assign to them. “He was,” 
said one of his most intelligent disciples, “a 
conciliator in his philosophy. His philosophy 
stands midway between Theism and Pantheism ; 
between historical right, as the expression of 
actual reason, and the absolute right to liberty 
and equality, as the end of universal history. 
His system seems to sanction the most profound. 
piety, and to regard Christianity as the true 
and absolute religion, at the very time when 
it appears also as its negation; just as 
in politics it presents itself as at one and 
the same moment conservative and progress- 
ive, favorable to existing rights and yet revo- 
lutionary.” * 

“Tt is impossible,” says M. Edmond Scherer, 


* Histoires de la philosophie allemande depuis Kant jusqu’a 
Hegel, by 8. Willm: a work crowned by the Institute: vol. iv, 
p. 337. 


326 PANTHEISM. 


‘to read Hegel without asking ourselves if he, 
be serious. He falls incessantly into a style of 
images and personifications; and one would 
suppose one’s self, in perusing his writings, to be 
present at the formation of a mythology, at the 
development of a world like that of the ancient 
Gnostics, in which notions assumed forms and 
marched on, passing through all kinds of adven- 
tures.”* M. Edmond Scherer’s is a mind hard 
to please, which is ever struck and offended by 
incoherence of objects, futility of artificial com- 
binations, and vain play upon words, even 
where he recognizes or admires the genius. 
The philosophical “rout” is not embarrassed 
for so slight a cause; it marches straight to the 
object toward which the dominant idea, once 
adopted, gives the impulse. In spite of its 
complexities and of its craving for the recon- 
ciliation of religion and of politics, the Pan- 
theism of Hegel has borne its natural fruits. 


A. school has resulted from it, which, in accord- 


* Mélanges (histoire religieuse, pp. 298, 338. 


PANTHEISM, 827 


ance with its proper and independent manifest- 
ations, a learned and moderate judge, M. Willm, 
characterizes in these words: “The new Ger- 
man philosophy, of which Feuerbach, Bruno 
Bauer, and Arnold Rige are the principal 
chiefs, comes, in its ultimate results, in contact 
with the Humanism of M. Pierre Leroux, the 
Positwism of M. Auguste Comte, and the 
Atheism of M. Proudhon. It tends to sub- 
stitute for the ancient worship the worship of 
humanity, and to found a new worship dispens- 
ing with God, and with morality properly so 
called. . . . There is no such thing as theology 
but only anthropology; for the mind of human- 
ity 1s the divine mind realized. ‘There is no 
longer any other piety than devotedness to the 
objects of humanity; no longer any other 
prayer than the contemplation of the human 
mind. . . . Man accomplishes every reasonable 
object if he accomplishes his own peculiar 
object, and he cannot do better than employ 


all his faculties to realize his own objects. 


328 PANTHEISM. 


Man's wilt be done: such is the principle of 
the new law.” * 

Such is the inevitable result at which Pan- 
theism, even that kind termed idealistic Pan- 
theism, ultimately arrives, whatever the eleva- 
tion of mind and the morality of mtent in its 
first authors. This is no scientific doctrine, 
founded upon the observation of facts and their 
laws; it is an hypothesis framed by dint of 
violent abstractions, verbal commutations and 
reasoning, in the blindness of a thought drunk 
with itself, Under the breath of Pantheism all 
beings—real and personal beings—vanish, and 
are replaced by an abstraction becoming in its 
turn the Being par excellence, the sole being, 
although without personality and without 
volition, swallowing up all things in a bottom- 
less abyss, which absorbs that being, too, after 
it has already absorbed everything that it has 
sought so to explain. 


* Histoire de la philosophie allemande, depuis Kant jusqu’a 
Hegel: by 8. Willm: vol. iv, pp. 624, 626. 


" 


PANTHEISM, 329 


Was there ever, in the conceptions of my- 
thology, or in the mystical dreams of the human 
imagination, anything so artificial, anything so 
vain, as this hypothesis, which at its very 
beginning, as well as throughout its entire 
course, loses sight of the best attested facts 
respecting man and the world; and, shocking 
equally science and common sense, departs as 
much from the method of philosophy as from 


the spontaneous instincts of mankind ? 


SIXTH MEDITATION. 


MATERIALISM. 


Marerraristic Pantheism is more consistent 
and more intelligible. I must at once restore 
to it its genuine name; it has no right to that 
of Pantheism: it sees God neither in the 
universe nor in man; the eternal world and 
ephemeral individuals are, in its eyes, only com- 
binations and different forms of matter. It is 
Materialism in its principle, and Atheism in its 
consequences. 

Two things strike me in the actual state of 
men’s minds; the progress that Materialism is 
making, and its constant timidity in that very 
progress, 


The progress of Materialism is evident; prog- 


ress in the learned world and in the unlearned 


MATERIALISM. 331 


world, in the name of the scientific studies and 
of popular tendencies. A contemporary spirit- 
ualistic philosopher, as distinguished by intel- 
lectual probity as by the independence and the 
moderation of his opinions, of whom the Duke 
de Broglie, on learning his death, exclaimed, 
“We have lost a sage ”—M. Damiron I mean— 
published eight years ago his “Mémoires pour 
servir & Vhistoire de la philosophie au 18° 
siécle;” he had read it in successive parts to 
the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. 
He said in his preface, “Men are disposed a 
second time to have Sensualism; they insist 
upon something that they may oppose to and 
substitute for pure and simple Spiritualism: be 
it so; but then let them at least well under- 
stand what it is that they are asking for. It is 
not merely Locke, the moderate chief of the 
school, nor is it d’Alembert, nor Saint-Lambert, 
nor even Helvetius; these keep themselves 
relatively within bounds: it is Diderot who 


has so little moderation, it is d’Holbach, it is 


332 MATERIALISM. 


Naigeon, it is Lalande, and de la Mettrie; it isa 
whole order of minds, not very eminent, but very 
decided and very consistent and logical in their 
materialism; materialists in all and for all, 
from the soul up to God—not forgetting, be it 
remembered, liberty, duty, a future life, etc. ... 
These men, with their heads in the air and 
their masks in their hand, with a confidence in 
themselves and a faith almost confounding 
itself with religion, profess openly as truth, 
fatalism, egotism, and atheism. This is what 
men want, and what, if they wish to be logical, 
men must want, when, closely or remotely, they | 
adhere to a philosophy that reduces everything 
to sensation, and that which is the object of 
sensation. Let there then be no illusion upon 
this subject; all the principles of morals and of 
religion are at stake. Sensualism 7s what it is, 
and can be nothing else. It was made a com- 
plete system in the eighteenth century; nothing 
remains in it that can be either made or re 


made; and if men recur to it in our days, the 


MATERIALISM. 333 


mechanism and the form may be altered—for 
these are variable—but not the essential sub- 
stance, for that is no¢ so. There are not two 
manners of being consequent any more in this 
system than in any other; however the attempt 
may be made, men can never by any repro- 
duction render it what it is not, and what its 
nature prevents it from ever being; so we must 
take it or we must leave it alone; we cannot 
change its principles.* 

What M. Damiron eight years ago felt would 
occur, has been accomplished rapidly. Sens- 
ualism, in its true nature as Materialism, has 
resumed its activity and returned to the stage; 
now tacitly admitted by sober, studious men, 
now loudly professed and loudly proclaimed by 
the “enfants terribles” of the school; professed 
and proclaimed not only with all its principles, 


but with all its consequences. 


* Mémoires pour servir 4 Vhistoire de la philosophie au 18e 
siécle, by Ph. Damiron, member of the Institute ; vol. i, p. xiv. 
1858. 


334 MATERIALISM. 


A profound. sentiment of hesitation and 
embarrassment clings, nevertheless, to the 
doctrme of Materialism. The most distin- 
guished of its adepts struggle to give expla- 
nations that look like disavowals, and many 
repudiate the charge of being Materialists as if 
it were an insult. “TI have never,” says M. de 
Remusat, “observed without astonishment the 
testy sensibility of philosophers upon this point. 
Who is there that has not witnessed the in- 
dignation manifested by the followers of the 
philosophy of sensation when they hear re- 
traced to them the positive consequences of this 
doctrine? It seems just as if their rightful 
claims were being disavowed, or as if they were 
being denounced; as if the Inquisition were 
still at hand, with its tortures and its auto- | 
da-fés; or as if their refuters were sending 
them to martyrdom. A general timidity reigns 
throughout their school; they seem to think 
freedom of opinions never. sufficiently assured, 


and society never tolerant enough, for their 


® 


” MATERIALISM. 335 


philosophy to declare and avow itself for such 
as it is. Whether from shame or from fear, 
Materialism asks to be tenderly handled, sus- 
pects that every one who defines her has the 
designs of a persecutor, makes protestations of 
her good intentions, and is alarmed at her very 
faith. She defends herself from the imputation 
of believing only in the senses, even while 
making sensation the one universal fact. It 
might be said that she blushes at matter just 
as persons infirm of faith blush at the name of 
Jesus. Perhaps this may be an indirect proof 
of the distrust which their cause Inspires in 
Materialists, and an involuntary avowal that 
the human mind belongs not to them.” * 
Whence arise, what signify, these two con- 
tradictory facts: on the one side, the perse- 
verance and the facility with which, in our 
days, Materialism reproduces and propagates it- 
self; on the other side, the uneasiness and the 


* Essais de philosophie, by Charles de Remusat: vol. ii, 
p. 179. 


i 
336 MATERIALISM. ~ 


timidity which it inepie in many of those 
even who admit it? : . 

Materialism is the doctrine of appearances. 
“Specious doctrine,” says M. Vacherot, “to 
those whose conception of things depends solely 
upon their ability to picture them to them- 
selves.”* It is by their material appearances 
that, at the outset, the external world and man 
himself manifest themselves to the human 
mind. It is only by reflection and by a process 
of observation within itself that it penetrates 
beyond mere appearances, and discovers what 
appearances alone would never enable it to see. 
To minds at once active and superficial, inquis- 
itive, impatient to acquire science, although 
not very nice as to the kind, Materialism is a 
commodious and apparently clear solution of 
certain difficult and obscure questions which 
fasten irresistibly upon the human under- 
standing. 

Besides all this, these apekcue and the 


* La métaphysique et la science, vol. i, p. 171. 


. MATERIALISM, 837 


different solutions of which they are susceptible, 
have their epochs of ardor or languor, of favor 
or discredit. In our days, the fruitful activity 
and the brilliant progress of the sciences of the 
material world, come in aid of the doctrine of 
Materialism. This progress is, however, far 
from being as exclusive of other progress as is 
often said, Although less popular than a few 
years ago, Spiritualism has not ceased to be an 
active and influential doctrine in the elevated 
region of philosophy, and the Christian awak. 
ening persists and develops itself energetically 
in the face of the adversaries of Christianity. 
The times in which we live are entitled to 
more justice than men accord to them; jntel- 
lectual labors are now very extensive and 
very varied; the most different tendencies 
coexist, and pursue their independent career, 
Even in this, Materialism is again the doc. 
trine of appearances; it is neither so strong 
nor so near its triumph as it has the air of 


being. — 
22 


*~ 


338 MATERIALISM. - 


Nothing proves this better than the hesitation 
and persistent embarrassment of the most dis- 
tinguished among its adherents. The circum- 
stance noticed by M. de Remusat twenty-five 
years ago, is recurring at the present day as 
plainly as ever. Sometimes we find disavowals 
of the consequences of the principle of Material- 
ism, and attempts of all kinds to escape from 
those consequences; sometimes we find efforts 
made to disguise the principle itself under purer 
colors. A general and enduring instinct in man 
persists in protesting against the appearances 
upon which Materialism is founded. Man does 
not believe either himself or the universe to be 
exclusively matter. The distinction between 
matter and mind is a natural and spontane- 
ous, a primitive and permanent, belief of the 
human race. 

And is this, then, merely an instinct and an 
aspiration, a proud pretension of human nature? 
Is it not, on the contrary, the innate sentiment, 


the intimate knowledge of that essential fact in 


a 


MATERIALISM. 339 


humanity of which observation recognizes and 
evidences the existence ? 

The fact to which I allude is the following: 
As soon as a consciousness of life is awakened 
in man—as soon as he feels and perceives what 
is taking place within him—he has a perception 
of himself as of a real, personal, and distinct 
being. He gives voice to this feeling and this 
perception as soon as he uses the word “I,” and 
he does so before he has any clear knowledge 
in detail of the being whose existence he go 
recognizes and affirms. 

When, in the natural development of life, 
man thus makes himself as a real and personal 
being, the object of his own observation, he 
recognizes in himself as such real and personal 
being certain facts in their nature essentially 
different. On the one side, he recognizes a 
body inherent in his being, which forms part of 
his being, and through which he communicates 
with the external world, either by the impres- 


sions which he receives from that world, or by 


340 MATERIALISM, 


the modes in which he acts upon that world. 
On the other side, whether he regard himself 
as, so to say, the theater of action, or as the 
very actor, he recognizes himself to be a single 
being, a being permanent and abiding, ever the 
same in the midst of the variety of his personal 
impressions or of his actions upon the world 
beyond him; and this, too, in spite of the com- 
plications and incessant transformations of his 
body, the organ and the medium of those im- 
pressions and actions. 

Thus it is that in man’s consciousness there is 
a manifestation and proof at once of the unity 
and of the complex nature of the human being; 
that is, in accordance with the spontaneous 
language of mankind, at once of the distinction 
and of the union of the soul and of the body. 
This is the primitive and essential fact of man 
in his actual life. 

In proportion as the human being develops 
himself, as he extends the circle of his observa- 


tions upon the world and upon himself, special 


MATERIALISM. B41 


facts confirm the general truth of which I have 
just given a summary, and prove the essential 
distinction of the soul and the body by the 
essential diversity of the properties of each. 
Thus the body, in its organization and in its 
life, is subject to fixed and pre-established laws, 
over which man’s will has no control or power; 
whereas the soul is essentially free, and capable 
of determining itself and of acting from motives 
foreign to the laws which govern the body. 
Fatality is the condition of the human being in 
corporeal existence; liberty is his privilege in his 
moral life. I say in his moral life, and the ex- 
pression reveals between the soul and the body 
another essential* and ineffaceable difference. 
The body is strange to every idea of morality, 
abandoned to the exigencies of its necessities 
and its appetites; it has no aspiration, no tend- 
ency but to satisfy them. The soul has needs 
and desires of quite a different kind, and they 
are often contrary to those of the body; and 


however often the soul may yield to the tenden- 


342 MATERIALISM. 


cies of the body, not seldom also does it with- 
stand and surmount them; and this both in 
persons of obscure condition, and in those who 
stand in the public gaze of men. When the 
body is dominant in man, man tends toward 
Materialism ; when he listens to the aspirations 
of soul it is, on the contrary, to Spiritualism 
that his nature rises. The complexity of his 
nature manifests itself in the development of 
his life as in the first instinct of his conscious- 
ness; at whatever epoch he is the subject either 
of his own or of our observation he cannot be 
called exclusively body, matter, without facts 
giving his assertion at each step the flattest 
contradiction. m 

Whence comes this essential and primordial 
fact—the fact of the complexity and yet unity 
of the human being? How is this union of 
soul and body accomplished? their mutual in- 
fluences exercised, how? Here, according to 
religion, is the mystery; here, for philosophy, 
- hes the problem. 


MATERIALISM. 343 


Materialism is but an hypothesis adopted for 
the explanation of this great fact, and the hy- 
pothesis consists not in the solution of the 
problem, but in its suppression by the denial 
of the fact itself. What need, they say, to seek 
~ to explain how the union of soul and body is 
accomplished? Neither this complexity of the 
human being nor his unity m that complexity 
is a reality. Man is only a product and an 
ephemeral form of matter! 

I shall not refuse myself the pleasure of 
refuting this hypothesis by the mouth of a 
contemporary philosopher, whom I shall soon 
myself have to combat. “ Nothing,” says 
M. Vacherot, “proves that the hypothesis of 
Materialism is true; on the contrary, positive 
facts evidence its falsity. . .. If the soul be only 
the result of the play of the organs, how is it 
that the soul is able to resist the impressions 
and the appetites of the body, to direct, con- 
centrate, and govern its faculties? If the will 


be but the instinct in a different form, how 


344 MATERIALISM. 


explain its empire over the instinct? This fact 
is an iresistible argument; it is the rock 
upon which Materialism has always wrecked 
itself, and upon which it will continue to do 
so.... The wisdom of the ancients pronounced 
its decree more than two thousand years ago. 
‘Do we not see, says Socrates, according to 
Plato, ‘that the soul governs all the elements 
of which it is pretended that it is composed ? 
that the soul resists them throughout the whole 
course of life, and subdues them in every way, 
repressing some harshly and painfully, as where 
the gymnastic or the medical method is resorted 
to; repressing others more gently, rebuking 
these, warning those, speaking to desires, to 
anger, to fear, as to things of a nature alien to 
its own? So Homer, in the “Odyssey,” repre- 


sents Ulysses as 


“Smiting his breast, and chiding thus his heart : 
Bear this, O heart, thou that hast worse endured. ” * 


* XrIOo¢ dé mAnéac, kpadinv jrinare n60w, 
TétAabs 0&, xpadin. Kai Kivrepov GAdAo mor’ ErAne. 


Odyssey, Book xx, v. 17. 


MATERIALISM. 3845 


““Do you think,’ adds Socrates, ‘that Homer 
would have so expressed himself had, in his 
conception, the soul been a mere harmony, 
necessarily governed by the passions of the 
body? Did he not rather think that the soul 
ought to govern and master those passions, and 
that the soul is something far more divine than 
any harmony ?’” * 

Materialists themselves have felt the feeble- 
ness of their hypothesis; to support it they 
have invented a second hypothesis. “No force 
without matter, no matter without force,” + says 
Dr. Buchner, at the present day one of the most 
resolute interpreters of the doctrine. That is to 
say, not being able to explain facts by matter 
alone, as matter is observed and conceived 
naturally by the human mind, they endow 
matter with what they term force, a principle 
of movement and of production. “Matter and 


*La Métaphysique et la science, by M. Vacherot, vol. i, p. 
174; Plato, Pheed. xliii. 

+Le Materialisme contemporain en Allemagne, by M. Paul 
Janet, of the Institute, p. 20. 1864. 


346 MATERIALISM, 


force are,” it 1s now said, “inseparable; both 
have existed from all eternity.” Thus, imperi- 
ously urged by instinct and by their observa- 
tion of facts, they begin again by distinguishing 
and naming separately matter and force; then, 
all at once, they confound them, treat them as 
united in their essence and from all eternity, 
and conclude by believing that they have suc- 
ceeded in giving an explanation of man and of 
the world! | 

In this, what do they more than add an 
abstraction to an abstraction, and an hypothesis 
to an hypothesis? We are here in the presence 
of facts that are certain and yet perplexing; in 
presence of an external world, which evidently 
has not always been such as it is, which had a 
beginning, which is continuing to develop itself 
according to certain laws, and which is tending 
to certain ends; in the presence, too, of man, 
evidently a being at once one and complex, 
identical and yet variable. The ancients gave 


names and explanations to those incontestible 


MATERIALISM. 847 


facts, but the names and explanations are now 
rejected! Still, names and explanations are 
needed; man must put something in the place 
of God, Creator, and Providence—in the place 
of mind, and matter, and soul, and body. It is 
not for the first time that man finds himself 
confronted by this necessity, or that he essays 
to satisfy it; many abstractions, many words, 
have been already employed for this purpose. 
God was replaced by nature, by substance, by 
cause; the human soul was transformed into 
vital principle ; the vital principle was elevated 
to the dignity of soul. It seems that these 
words, these abstractions, have had their time 
and lost their credit; and so now it is force 
which replaces them; force is mind, force is 
soul, force creates, force is God. It is enough 
now that they incorporate force with body; 
the problem no longer exists; man and the 
universe are laid bare! 

When Leibnitz, to combat the Idealism 
of Descartes, and the Pantheism of Spinoza, 


348 MATERIALISM, 


developed the idea of force, he did not foresee 
that that very notion would be one day made 
use of to reduce to nonentities God, the human 
soul, all real and personal being, all first and 
final cause; to reduce, in short, everything to a 
medley of mechanics and dynamics incarnate 
in matter ! 

However specious it may appear to super- 
ficial minds, or to minds prejudiced in its favor 
by the peculiar nature of their studies and of 
their habitual labors, Materialism, like Pan- 
theism, is only an hypothesis—an hypothesis 
constructed by dint of mere abstractions and 
purely verbal assertions. These not only disre- 
gard or suppress the facts which they pretend 
to explam, but are in direct contradiction 
with facts themselves recognized and proved 
by psychological observation. It is, in effect, 
an hypothesis, (I am forced here to repeat what 
I before affirmed of Pantheism,) equally revolt-. 
ing to true science and to common sense. 

The hypothesis of Materialism has but a 


MATERIALISM. 3849 


single merit; it 1s more consistent than those 
of the other systems. But even to this merit 
Materialism loses its title whenever it shrinks 
from pushing its principles boldly to their con- 
sequences, whether philosophical or practical: 
that is to say, whenever it shrinks from deny- 
ing man’s liberty, a moral law, the necessary 
principles of the human mind—whenever, in 
short, it shrinks from proclaiming its ultimate 
results, which are, as M. Damiron puts them, 
Fatalism, Egotism, Atheism. Philosophers are 
right in seeking for truth and in respecting 
truth for itself and at every risk; but there © 
are some consequences which are the clearest 
evidence of a vice in principle; and this vice, 
in Materialism, is the blind forgetfulness of the 
best proved facts and the most essential ele- 


ments of human nature. 


SEVENTH MEDITATION. 


SKEPTICISM. 


TurreE are two kinds of Skepticism, experi- 
mental Skepticism and systematic Skepticism. 
Experimental Skepticism is the result of the in- 
certitude which arises in men’s minds from the 
spectacle of the infinite variety, discordance, and. 
mobility of human opinions. Systematic Skep- 
ticism, on the other hand, challenges the power 
itself of the human understanding, and declares 
it incapable of knowing things in their essence 
—reality im itself, The one is doubt applied 
in practice ; the other is doubt affirmed as a 
principle. — : 

In an essay on Skepticism, written in 1830, 
M. J ouffroy-treated experimental and practical 


skepticism with great contempt: this skepticism 


SKEPTICISM. 3851 


“founds itself,” says he, “only upon the ap- 
parent contradictions of human judgment. To 
prove that. there is a contradiction either be- 
tween the results at which each faculty of the 
mind when taken separately arrives, or between 
the final results attained by different faculties, 
as by the sense and by the reason; to establish 
that there is a contradiction of a like nature 
between the opinions received by different men 
or by different nations, or between those opin- 
ions themselves, which; at different epochs, have 
variously for a time contented humanity; then 
to conclude from all this that the human intel- 
ligence regards in turn as true things which are 
contradictory, and that consequently there is for 
that intelligence no truth at all: such is all the 
mechanism in which this second-rate skepticism 
consists which has fascinated, and still continues 
to fascinate, whole hosts of little minds, Long 
ago this skepticism was refuted, and at all its 
points; long ago the unity of human truth was 


demonstrated, after having been admitted d 


352 SKEPTICISM. 


priori in all ages by their leading minds. This 
kind of skepticism is a theme upon which men 
will long continue to dilate; the darling sub- 
ject for wits, it merits not to arrest the attention 
of philosophers.” 

By way of amends, however, for these re- 
marks, M. Jouffroy makes an immense conces- 
sion to the systematic skepticism which declares 
the human mind incapable of knowing things 
as they really are in themselves, for he admits 
this skepticism to be rationally legitimate ; 
“the foundation of all belief,” says he, “is an act 
of faith, blind but irresistible. In effect there 
is no contradiction between faith and skep- 
ticism; for man believes by instinct and doubts 
by reason. . . . Skeptics fall into no contradic. 
tion when, in the practice of life, they believe 
their senses, their consciousness, their memory, 
and when they act in consequence; they obey 
the laws of their instinctive nature by so be- 
lieving, and they obey their rational natures by 


confessing that their beliefs are illegitimate. 


SKEPTICISM, 358 


So we equally excuse humanity which believes, 
and skepticism which doubts ; but we cannot 
equally excuse the philosophers who have com- 
bated skepticism by striving to demonstrate 
the rational legitimacy of human belief When 
men affirm that mankind believes, and that 
skeptics do so with mankind, they aftirm a fact 
in itself incontestable; when they add that 
mankind believes itself right in believing, 
that is to say, virtually admits that the human 
intelligence sees things as they are, this is 
true too, and skeptics do not deny it; but 
when, grappling with skepticism itself, men 
pretend to show that the human intelligence 
really sees things as they are, this is a preten- 
sion which I cannot understand. What! do 
they not perceive that this pretension is 
nothing less than the pretension of demon. 
strating the human intelligence by the human 
intelligence, which has been, is, and will be 
eternally impossible? We believe skepticism 


_ forever invincible, because we regard skep- 
23 


354 SKEPTICISM. 


ticism as the final word of the reason concerning 
the reason itself.” * 

I do not agree with M. Jouffroy in his dis- 
dain for experimental and practical skepticism. 
This is not, it 1s true, a system which philos- 
ophers are called upon to refute, but a fact 
which ought to occupy an important place 
with them, for by showing to us how incom-— 
plete human science is, and human error how 
frequent, it sets us on our guard against all 
presumptuous confidence in our own ideas, and 
against intolerance toward the ideas of others 
—two of the most dangerous infirmities to 
which human intelligence and society are 
liable. But as for the reasoning which impels 
M. Jouffroy to accept the systematic and defin- 
itive skepticism as to the intrinsic reality of 
things, I repudiate it altogether. If that were, 
as he says, “the final word of the reason re- 
specting the reason itself,” it would be the 
negation, or to use a better expression, the 


* Mélanges philosophique, pp. 238-240. 


SKEPTICISM. 355 


suicide, of man’s reason and of the human in- 
telligence, | 

In his discourse which he pronounced in 
1813, on resuming his functions at the “Faculté 
des Lettres,” M. Royer-Collard summed up his 
conclusions upon this fundamental question— 
conclusions very different, more different essen- 
tially than even apparently they are, from those 
arrived at by M. Jouffroy. Whereas M. Jouf. 
froy believes systematic skepticism forever in- 
vincible, “because he regards it as the final 
word of the reason concerning the reason,” 
M. Royer-Collard, on the contrary, ends his dis- 
course with these words: “We cannot divide 
man; we cannot assign a part only to skep- 
ticism; as soon as skepticism once penetrates 
into the understanding, in invades it through- 
out.” I would confirm this conclusion of 
M. Royer-Collard, by carrying still further the 
reasoning which led him to it. 

“The most general result,” says he, “pre- 


sented by the history of modern philosophy— 


356 SKEPTICISM. 


its most striking characteristic when contrasted 
with ancient philosophy—is its skepticism with 
respect to the existence of the external world; 
that world in which mankind has so long 
believed, which begins to reveal itself in us 
with our existence itself, and in the bosom of 
which we are forced to perceive ourselves as 
mere fragments of its immensity. . . . I am not 
here to reason in favor of the received opinion; 
that opinion needs neither proofs nor defenders; 
it is rooted deeply enough in our most intimate 
nature to brave all attack. It is not the world 
that risks anything at the hands of the philos- 
ophers; it is rather the honor of philosophy 
which suffers some discredit; it is rather philos- 
ophy that relieves the vulgar from a part of 
the respect which philosophy yet demands at 
its hands, when it gives birth to paradoxes 
bearing, seemingly, the very impress of folly. 
Moreover, whether the material world really 
exist or not, is not a matter in controversy; 


this question would resolve itself into one still 


SKEPTICISM. 857 


more general—whether all those faculties of 
ours, of which the authority is indivisible, are 
organs of truth or organs of falsehood; and 
upon this point we shall ever be driven to 
accept the testimony of those very organs. 
The sole question which belongs to philosoph- 
ical analysis, consists in examining if it be cer- 
tain that our faculties attest to us the existence 
of an external world, and if the human race 
believes in this existence; for if it believes in 
it, this universal belief becomes a fact in our 
intellectual constitution; and whether this fact 
be a primitive one, or a deduction from any 
anterior fact—whether it be the immediate 
teaching of nature or an acquisition by reason- 
ing—it is entitled to its place unmutilated in the 
synthetic table of science. Has it disappeared? 
Then the man of philosophy is not the man of 
nature; science is false, and consequently, the 
analysis without fidelity; and one may rest 
assured that philosophers have inserted in the 


understanding some principle, or some fact, 


358 SKEPTICISM. 


which was not there before; or that they have 
not collected with care all the principles and 
facts which are actually there,” 

Having thus formalized the question, M. 
Royer-Collard follows it up with an inquiry as 
exact as it is profound, of the psychological 
fact of the perception of the external world 
which accompanies the fact of sensation: this 
inquiry leads him to this conclusion: 

“Sensation has no object; sensation is merely 
relative to the sentient being; if not perceived, 
sensation does not exist. But the perception, 
which affirms an external. existence, supposes 
two things—the mind which perceives, and 
the object which is perceived; the being that 
thinks, and the being that is the subject-matter 
of thought. Just as the sensation is relative to 
the mind, so is the act of the perception relative 
to it also, and just so does it suppose the mind; | 
the object, on the contrary, supposes neither 
the mind nor the mind’s perception. The object 


does not exist because we perceive it; but we 


SKEPTICISM. 359 


perceive it because it exists—because we are 
endowed with the faculty of perception. In a 
city inhabited no longer, there remain no sensa- 
tion, no idea, no judgment; the houses remain, 
and even the streets, and with them nature, 
with all nature’s laws, which are not suspended 
in their course. To the universe, the energetic 
presence of its Creator suffices; it does not 
require our presence; the absence of spectators 
would not make it languish; it existed before 
us, it will exist after us; its reality is independ- 
ent of us and of our thoughts—it is absolute. 
The authority which persuades us of this is no 
less than that of the consciousness itself; it is 
_ the authority of the primitive laws of thought, 
and to man’s mind those laws are absolute laws 
of truth. The same draught may convey the 
impression of sweetness and of bitterness, be- 
cause sensation is relative to the variable state 
of sensibility, and sensibility itself is relative to 
organization; but the laws of the mind are an 


immutable standard. The imperfection of 


_ 


360 SKEPTICISM. 


knowledge does not render it uncertain, and 
although it admits of degrees, it does not admit 
of contradiction. Our limited faculties do not, 
it is true, perceive all that there is in things; 
but still, what they do perceive, is in effect there 
Just as they perceive it. . . . Ifa man call upon 
me to prove this by reasoning, I shall, in my 
turn, demand of him, too, that he first prove to 
me by reasoning that reasoning is more con- 
vincing than perception ; that he at least prove 
that the memory, without which there is no 
such thing as reasoning, is a faculty more to be 
relied upon than those faculties whose testimony 
they reject. 

Intellectual life is an uninterrupted succes 
sion, not merely of ideas, but of beliefs, explics, 
or implicit. The beliefs of the mind are the 
force of the soul and the moving incentives of 
the will. Whatever determines us to believe 
we call evidence. . . . Reason renders no account 
of what is evident; to condemn it to do so is 


to annihilate it, for it also has need of an evi- 


wo F 
‘a a 


- j s 


SKEPTICISM, 361 


dence peculiar to itself. Did not reasoning rest 
upon principles anterior to the reason, analysis 
would be without end, and synthesis without 
commencement. ‘The fundamental laws of belief 
constitute the intelligence itself; and as those 
laws all flow from the same source, they have 
the same authority; they-judge by the same 
right; there is no appeal from the tribunal 
of one to that of another. Whoever revolts 
against any single one of these laws, revolts 
against them all, and so abdicates all his nature. 
Are there weapons of legitimate use against 
that faculty by which we perceive the external 
world? These same weapons may be turned 
against the conscience, the memory, the moral 
sense, against reason itself... . Let but, in any 
single point, the nature of knowledge—the 
nature, I say, and not the degree—be made 
subordinate to our means of knowing, and all 
certitude is at an end; nothing is true, nothing 
is false. But it is not enough to say this; for 


all is true and false altogether, since truth and 


362 SKEPTICISM, 


falsehood no longer differ from sweet and bitter, 
The void itself is then deprived of its absolute 
nullity: it enters into the domain of the rela- 
tive; it is something, nothing, according to the 
conformation of the spectator’s eye. The useful 
is the sole subject that the understanding con- 
templates, the sole “subject for which the heart 
has to make its laws. A legislation capricious 
and without efficacy, which applies only shifting 
rules to actions, and which has none for the 
intentions and for the desires. This is not mere 
declamation ; all these consequences have been 
deduced from skeptical doctrines with an exact- 
itude leaving nothing to be either desired or 
contested. It is then a fact that public and 
private morality, the order of society and the 
happiness of individuals, are directly at stake in 
the controversy between true philosophy and 
false philosophy respecting the reality of knowl- 
edge. For when existences themselves become 
problems, what force remains to the bond that 


unites them? We cannot divide the entire 


SKEPTICISM. — 863 


man; we cannot assign a part only to skepti- 
cism; as soon as skepticism once penetrates into 
the understanding it invades it throughout.” * 
I retrench nothing, change nothing in these 
remarkable words that express so energetically 
the conclusions of the common sense of mankind. 
I would only render them still more complete, 
by illustrating in its primitive and indestruct- 
ible unity the fact upon which they are founded. 
“We cannot divide man,” says M. Royer- 
' Collard. Here is precisely the risk that philo- 
sophical science incurs, and to which it too often 
succumbs. It divides man in order to study 
him; and after having so studied him, when it 
seeks to deduce from its laborious operation 
what man in his complete and living reality is, 
we find the result a strange misapprehension, 
because science has neglected to re-establish the 
unity which it broke. It puts together, it 1s 
true, the scattered members, but the being itself 


*Fragments de M. Royer-Collard, in the works of Reid, 
translation of M. Jouffroy, vol. iv, pp. 426-451. 


364 SKEPTICISM. 


has disappeared ; and then it is that philosophers 
know not how to solve the problems or to extri- 
cate themselves from the doubts by which they 
are confronted. Entire, living, one, the human 
being explained himself; mutilated and severed 
into distinct parts, that being loses all power 
and falls into obscurity. 

What is sensation, what perception, judg- 
ment, reasoning, reason, will, consciousness ? 
They are the human being, feeling, perceiving, 
judging, reasoning, willing, and observing what 
is passing within him. This is no troop of 
actors playing, each his part, in a complex 
drama; but a being single and alive, actor and 
sole spectator in the drama of his proper life. 

What is this one and single being doing 
when he feels, perceives, judges, reasons, wills, 
and watches what is occurring within himself? 
He is taking cognizance at once of himself, and 
what is not himself. His own existence and 
the existence of that which is not himself, reveal 


themselves to him from the very first in those 


SKEPTICISM. 865 


diverse facts and acts which philosophical 
science discriminates, and calls by the particu- 
lar names of sensation, perception, judgment, 
reason, will, consciousness. The primitive and 
essential fact at the root of all, is the fact itself 
of the cognizance which man takes of himself, 
and of what is not himself. A cognizance, at 
first confused, and always incomplete, but at 
the same time direct and certain. Not by way 
of deduction, nor as a mere appearance, but by 
way of immediate intuition, and as a positive 
reality, does the human being become aware of 
his own existence and of that existence which 
is not his. This fact is lost sight of, or at least 
is not characterized exactly and as it is in itself, 
when it is said that man believes naturally 
and inevitably in his own existence, and in that 
of the external world. ‘This is a very different 
thing from Lelief: it is knowledge itself of that 
double reality, internal and external, called by 
the name of Man and World. Philosophers 
ignore, and they change the nature of this fact, 


366 SKEPTICISM. 


when, merely playing with verbal distinctions 
and reasonings, they condemn the human mind 
not to issue forth from itself, when they refuse 
to it the right to affirm as real, out of the mind 
and in itself, that which, in the mind and for 
the mind, the mind yet admits to be true. 

The human being may deceive himself, and 
often does deceive himself in such or such a 
special affirmation as to external realities; it 
has of them only a knowledge incomplete, and 
liable to error; but its general and permanent 
affirmation as to their existence is still fully 
justified and legitimate; it knows them as it 
knows itself, by the same proof and by the 
same natural process. M. Royer-Collard ex- 
presses admirably this great fact when he says: 
“The universe does not exist because we per- 
ceive it; but we perceive it because it exists. 
. . . It needs not our presence; the absence of 
spectators would not make it languish away; it 
was before us, it will still be after us; its 


reality is independent of us: it is absolute.” 


SKEPTICISM. 367 


Systematic skepticism is not, like Materialism 
and Pantheism, an hypothesis invented, although 
unsuccessfully invented, in order to solve the 
grand problem of soul and body, of finite 
and infinite; its error is not less considerable, 
although of a different character. It consists in 
a defective examination of the primitive fact of 
the human mind, and in the misapprehension of 
the nature and the import of that fact. This 
fact is by no means, as M. Jouffroy affirms, “a 
faith blind and uresistible,” disavowed by 
rational science; it is really the natural knowl- 
edge, and the earliest knowledge acquired by 
the human being when it enters into activity; a 
knowledge, confused and incomplete, either of 
itself or of what is not itself; but still a knowl- 
edge direct and certain of the existence of itself, 
and of the existence of what is not itself. “Man 
believes by instinct and doubts by reason,” adds * 
M. Jouffroy; “skeptics obey the law of their 
instinctive nature when they believe, like the 


mass of mankind, in their senses, their con- 


368 SKEPTICISM. 


sciousness, their memory, and when they act in 
consequence; so also they obey their rational 
nature when they confess that their beliefs are 
illegitimate.” 

This is strangely to zgnore—I permit myself 
the use of this, here, incorrect expression—at 
once the reality of facts, and the value of words. 
What M. Jouffroy terms instinct, is the intuitive 
consciousness of internal reality and of external 
reality, and this consciousness the human being 
acquires directly by the complete and indivis- 
ible exercise of all his faculties; what he 
terms reason is the result of the isolated opera- 
tion of one of the faculties of the human 
being, who virtually forgets, when he decom- 
poses himself for his own study, what he really 
is. Skepticism is not the “final word of the 
reason respecting the reason ;” it is the suicide 
of the reason by a negation falsely termed 
scientific, of natural evidence, and of the com- 


mon sense of mankind. 


EIGHTH MEDITATION. 


IMPIETY, RECKLESSN ESS, AND PERPLEXITY. 


Tue different systems, of each of which I ° 
have endeavored to show the essential and 
characteristic vice, do not remain confined to 
learned regions, or to the classes to which, from 
profession or from taste, man and the world are - 
a special object of study. The breath of 
science penetrates to a distance, and pervades, 
unseen itself, places even where ignorance 
reigns, How often in remote cities and even 
rural districts, among a population alien to every 
kind of study, have I met with and discovered 
the traces of Rationalism, of Positivism, of Pan- 
theism, Materialism, Skepticism; and yet these 
had been imported, imperceptibly and in manner 


that the sense could not detect, like a noxious 
24 


de 


870 IMPIETY—PERPLEXITY. 


miasma, into places where their very names 
were unknown; and yet they bore everywhere 
their natural fruits! There is a contagion in 
the intellectual as well as in the moral order; 
and the facility, the rapidity, the universality 
of communication, which contribute so much to 
the force and the grandeur of modern civiliza- 
tion, are as much at the disposal of evil as of 
good, of error as of truth. 

The effects of this intellectual contagion vary 
with the social regions into which it penetrates, 
and the dispositions that it there encounters. 
‘When the systems of philosophy present them- 
selves confusedly to minds in which ambitious 
and passionate feelings are fermenting, and 
these feelings are capable of being aided by 
those systems, their action 1s prompt and for- 
cible. At epochs and among classes where 
pride and ambition of intellect reign without 
bounds, Rationalism and Pantheism are received 
with favor. In those, on the other hand, 


conspicuous for the almost exclusive study of 


IMPIETY—PERPLEXITY. 871 


the material world, or for the ardor with 
which men thirst after physical enjoyments, 
Positivism and Materialism seem very readily 
to prevail. After long perturbations of society, 
and in the midst of the disappointments and the 
jaded feelings that they leave behind them, 
‘many minds fall involuntarily into skepticism, 
or make it even their refuge. These different 
social facts, and the influence which they give 
to the different systems of philosophy, manifest 
themselves in our days in the state of men’s 
minds, and they do so whether men be learned 
or unlearned, demonstrative or taciturn. 

Three dispositions of the mind are very ob- 
servable and very general—impiety, reckless- 
ness as to religion, and religious perplexity. 

I feel no difficulty in thus ranging side by 
side things which are coexisting, and develop- 
ing themselves simultaneously although con- 
trary in their nature. There are epochs when 
a great current rises and hurries society toward 


a single object and by a single way. Others 


372 IMPIETY—PERPLEXITY. 


there are where different currents cross and 
combat one another, and impel society at the 
same moment toward different objects. The 
spirit of authority and of faith was very pre 
dominant in the seventeenth century; the spirit 
of independence and of innovation in the eight- 
eenth. The nineteenth century is sweeping 
on its way under the empire of tendencies 
various but simultaneous in their power and 
their activity; the different principles and 
elements of our society, good or the reverse, 
confront one another, awaiting the moment 
when they may again be harmonized. I re- 
traced the awakening of Christianity and its 
progress; I seek in no respect to qualify any 
remark that I have made, either as to that 
important movement or as to the confidence 
with which it inspires me; but I, at the same 
time, believe also in the forcible influence of 
the antichristian demonstrations which are 
taking the form of impiety or of recklessness ; 


nor can I disregard the force of that religious 


IMPIETY—PERPLEXITY. 373 


perplexity into which this great struggle throws 
so many men of feeble purpose, and even some 
men of eminent powers of mind. 

In our days impiety is spreading, and as- 
suming serious development, more especially 
among the operative classes, and in that young 
generation that issues from the middle classes, 
and is destined to follow the liberal professions. 
Not that the infection is universal even there; 
on the contrary, those classes show also the 
most different tendencies; among them, too, the 
progress of the Christian awakening has made 
itself felt, and religious belief is treated with 
more respect. There, however, it is that the 
evil of impiety has its focus and its center of 
expansion. Sometimes it manifests itself under 
gross and cynical forms, sometimes with a pre- 
tension to thought and learning; now by the 
brutal licentiousness of its behavior, now by 
the arrogant yet embarrassed expression of its 
opinions. Last year I received an invitation to 


attend the great congress of students assem- 


ah 


3T4é IMPIETY——PERPLEXITY. 


bled at Li¢ge; an invitation which, although I 
expressed for the purpose of this assemblage a 
real and a sincere interest, I declined. When I 
learned what the ideas were that had been there 
loudly expressed—when I read that the question 
had there been put as one between God and 
man, and that the idolatry of man had been 
proclaimed in the place of the adoration of God, 
—I experienced two sentiments the most con. 
tradictory, a lively satisfaction that I had held 
myself aloof from such a scene, and a profound 
regret, at the same time, that I had not been 
present to protest against such an invasion of 
Pantheism and of Atheism ito young souls, 
upon whom my thoughts only rest with senti- 
ments of affectionate hopefulness. I have 
grown old, I have had to undergo painful dis- 
appointments, but in spite of all, my first im- 
pulse has ever been to believe in the prompt 
efficacy of truth when it knocks unhesitatingly 
at the door of the mind; nor is it without re- 


luctance that I bring myself to wait for time 


IMPIETY—-PERPLEXITY. 3875 
and experience to unvail what is error. Of the 
two kinds of impiety which I have just alluded 
to, the impiety which is gross and cynical, 
which springs from immorality and which pro- 
duces immorality, is undoubtedly the more 
fatal to the human soul, to its dignity and its 
future lot; but systematic impiety—impiety that 
establishes itself into doctrine—is the more dan- 
gerous for human societies; for, enamored of 
itself, it takes its pride in selfglorification and 
selfpropagation. The ambitious ones of im- 
piety obtain more credit than those, the chief 
characteristic of whose impiety is licentiousness. 

Recklessness in religion is in our days a more 
widely spread evil than impiety. I do not 
here speak of that indifferentism with respect 
to religious subjects that the Abbé de Ja Men- 
nais so eloquently attacked ; that sentiment may 
be profound, and it may be frivolous; it may 
spring from Materialism, from Skepticism, from 
a thoughtful impiety, as well as from a gross 


forgetfulness of the paramount questions which 


376 IMPIETY—PERPLEXITY, . 


exercise the human mind. The recklessness 
now so common gives no thought at all to 
these subjects, does not picture to itself that 
there is any ground for so doing; where this 
tendency prevails, man’s thought confines itself 
to its terrestrial, its actual life; the business 
and. the interests of this life alone occupy him, 
alone content him; there is, as it were, a sleep 
of all those instincts and requirements of the 
human soul which go beyond this low region, 
and if not a complete abdication, at least a 
sluggish torpor of the heavenly part of our 
nature. 

Let not the friends of a religious life and of 
the Christian faith deceive themselves; it is 
here that they have the greatest obstacles to 
encounter, the deadest weight to lift and to 
remove. Aggression provokes resistance; a 
struggle leads to the marshaling of the dif- 
ferent hostile forces; nor does the learning of 
the believer dread to enter the arena with the 


learning of the incredulous. But recklessness 


IMPIETY—PERPLEXITY. 877 


in religion is like a vast Dead Sea in which no 
being lives, an immense barren desert in which 
no vegetation pushes. It is, if not the most 
revolting, at least the most formidable evil of 
the day. It is against this evil that Christians 
are bound, more especially, to direct their 
energies, for there are a world and an entire 
population here to be conquered. 

Nor will points @apput or means of action 
fail them in this great work. For if religious 
recklessness is in our days deplorably common, 
neither is perplexity as to religious matters a 
stranger among us. It springs from sentiments 
and out of interests very different in their 
natures, sometimes merely on the surface, some- 
times in the depths of the soul. There is a 
kind of perplexity founded upon the dictates 
of common sense, and entitled to every respect, 
but to which I do not accord, nevertheless, the 
epithet of religious; this perplexity is gener- 
ated by the instinct or the experience of the 


utility of religion for the maintenance of order 


878 IMPIETY—PERPLEXITY, 


in society, not merely in the great public 
society, but also in the smaller domestic 
societies, that is, in the state as well as in 
families, A man of distinguished mental capac- 
ity and of an honorable character, “eléve” of 
the “Ecole politechnique,” and “ingénieur en 
chef” in one of our great departments, was one 
day speaking to me with sorrow of the attacks 
leveled at Christianity. “It is not,” he said, 
“on my own account that I regret these 
attacks; you know I am a ‘ Voltairean;’ but I 
ask for regularity and peace in my own house- 
hold; I felicitate myself that my wife is a 
Christian, and I mean my daughters to be 
brought up like Christian women. These 
demolishers know not what they are doing; it 
is not merely upon our Churches, it is upon our 
houses, our homes and their inmates, that their 
blows are telling!” 

There is a perplexity more serious and more 
profound—a perplexity really religious—one 


suggested not merely by the necessity of social 


IMPIETY—PERPLEXITY. 379 


order, but by that of moral security, of har 
mony, of confidence, and of intimate hopeful- 
ness in the presence of the problems and of the 
chances that weigh upon man. This perplexity 
takes place not merely in the minds of thinking 
men—of men who render to themselves an ac- 
count of their internal troubles, and who avow 
them undisguisedly; it causes agitation and 
spreads desolation among multitudes of single- 
minded, modest, and silent men, who sutler 
from the antichristian malaria spread around 
them. What framer of statistics shall count 
their number? what philosopher minister suc- 
cessfully to their disease ? 

I go further still. I listen to contemporary 
philosophers themselves, and I find in the cases 
of some of the more eminent an intellectual per- 
plexity, showing itself clearly through opinions 
the most systematic, and the furthest removed 
from the Christian religion. I shall name but 
two—M. Vacherot and M. Edmond Scherer. I 


have no intention of entering here into a special 


880 IMPIETY—PERPLEXITY. 


examination of their ideas; I seek only to show 
the state of their minds and of their souls, as it 
results from the tenor of their works. 

I have read, and read over again, with seru- 
pulous attention, the two principal philosoph- 
ical treatises of M. Vacherot, La Métaphysique 
et la Science ou Principes de Philosophie Pos. 
wwwe,* and the Hssais de Philosophie Critique.t 
M. Vacherot does not desire to be, nor is he 
really, in his conscience and in his own eyes, an 
advocate either of Materialism, or Positivism, 
or Pantheism, or Atheism, or Skepticism. He 
analyzes and he refutes successively these dif. 
ferent systems, as conceived and expounded by 
their most distinguished representatives; he 
defends himself, and with warmth, from the 
charge of adhering to them: “a man,” he says, 
“ig not an Atheist, a Materialist, a Pantheist, 
an Idealist, because he does not believe in God, 
soul, mind, matter, world—in all these meta- 


* Second edition, three vols, 12mo., 1863. 
t One vol. 8vo., 1864, 


IMPIETY—PERPLEXIIY. 381 


physical words taken in a given acceptation. 
The true Atheist, if such a one exists, is he whose 
mind is grossly empirical, and wanting in the 
sense of what is intelligible, ideal, and divine. 
The true Pantheist is he who identifies truth 
and reality, God and the world, whether, like 
Spinoza and Goethe, he deifies the world, or 
like the Stoics, he materializes God. The true 
Materialist is he who degrades man to the 
beast, either by denying him his superior and 
really human faculties, or by deriving these 
from animal faculties. The true Idealist, like 
Berkeley, is he who rejects all external reality 
as an illusion, whatever the conception of that 
reality; whether it be as a thing made up of 
forces and of laws, or as consisting of extended 
matter.... All these words require to be 
defined and explained, or they necessarily oc- 
casion mysteries, contradictions, and absurdities. 
In their vague complexities they do not express 
ideas of sufficient simplicity, nor do they answer 


to ideas sufficiently precise for science to adopt 


: 
382 IMPIETY—PERPLEXITY. 


them unreservedly and without distinction. . . 
A chosen few exist whose sympathy is dear to 
me; I remain profoundly attached to all the 
truths which they, with reason, regard as con- 
stituting the strength, life, and honor of phi- 
losophy. I remain, like them, a Spiritualist, an 
Idealist, a Theist, although with other methods, 
another language, and also, beyond a doubt, 
with notable reservations.” * 

Nor is M. Vacherot more of a Skeptic than 
of a Materialist and a Pantheist; he believes 
firmly in absolute truth, in scientific metaphys- 
ics, and in the universal and essential principles 
which form their bases. “Metaphysics,” he 
says, “have nothing to dread from analysis; it 
is a test from which they can only issue with 
honor. The truths @ priort upon which the 
science rests, will inspire no more doubt so soon 
as it comes to be well understood that those 
truths are founded upon the ordinary prin- 


* La Métaphysique et la science; in the Introduction and 
the Preface, vol. i., pp. Xvi, Xxxiv. 


IMPIETY—PERPLEXITY. 383 


ciples of demonstration, like all the truths 4 
priort of the other sciences. Metaphysics have, 
and will ever have for their object, the Being 
infinite, necessary, absolute, and universal. 
Now the ideas of being, infinite, necessary, 
absolute, universal, are so involved in the 
notion of appearance, finite, contingent, relative, 
individual, that it is impossible for the human 
mind to separate them. Accordingly, in order 
to be entitled to deny Metaphysics, and the 
truths which are peculiar to them, we must first 
mutilate the human mind, and reduce it to the 
pure faculties of sensation and imagination 
which are common to it with animals, From - 
the moment when the reason, the thought, the 
faculty peculiar to the human intelligence, enters 
the field, it brings necessarily with it the object 
of sensation and of imagination, under the 
categories of quantity, quality, beimg, relation, 
unity. Then it is that appear to the mind the 
distinction, and afterward the logical con- 


nection, of the two terms corresponding to each 


yf 
384 IMPIETY—PERPLEXITY. 


category, of the finite and the infinite, of the 
contingent and the necessary, of the individual 
and the universal, of the relative and the ab- 
solute, of appearance and being. The thought 
enters then perforce, whether it is conscious of 
it or not, upon the peculiar ground of Meta- 
physics. Nothing but a gross and, so to say, 
an animal empiricism, has the right to deny the 
conceptions and the truths of this science, and 
the denial is a denegation of the higher faculties 
of the intelligence.” * 

It is impossible to disavow more indignantly 
Materialism, Atheism, Skepticism, with their 
principles and their consequences. But after 
all these declarations and these disavowals, 
when M. Vacherot has to draw his conclusions, 
and has to set the affirmation of his own ideas 
by the side of his criticism of the ideas of other 
writers; when he, in his turn, undertakes to 
explain God and the world, this twofold object 
of Metaphysics, the perplexity of the thinker 


* La Métaphysique et la science; Preface, vol. i, p. xlviii. 


Se 385 
becomes at once apparent, and he falls, in spite 
of himself, into the very paths from which he 
proposed to escape. 

“What do you understand by God?” says 
he; “the perfect Being? He is the God of 
Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Malebranche, Letb- 
nitz; he is the God of all the theologians with 
whom Divinity and Perfection are synonyms. 
That God is our God too. But if, of this God, 
immutable in his perfection, elevated beyond 
time, space, the movement of universal life, you 
make anything else than an ideal of the 
thought, I confess I no longer comprehend him. — 
.. . These ideas, all equally reducible to the 
idea of the Perfect, as understood by Plato, 
Descartes, Malebranche, Fénélon, Leibnitz, can 
have no objective reality, and only exist in the 
ideal order of pure thought; absolutely ‘in the 
same manner as the figures of geometry do, 
which lose all the vigorousness and all the 
exactitude of their definition elsewhere than in 


the domain of the understanding... . Per- 
25 


386 IMPIETY—PERPLEXITY. 


fection exists, can only exist, in the thought. 
It is of the essence of perfection to be purely 
ideal; and the remark applies as truly to the 
Perfect Being of Descartes and of Leibnitz as 
to the ‘intelligible world’ of Plato and of 
Malebranche. <A ‘perfect God, or a ‘real 
God 2? Theology must make its choice. A 
perfect God is only an ideal God.”* 

That is to say, that for Metaphysics to admit 
God, the Being God must vanish, and remain 
only a conception, a notion, an idea. It may 
be that to a philosopher or two this may seem 
still Theism; to the human soul, and to the 
human race, it is Atheism, and nothing else. 

God thus made to vanish, what becomes in 
its turn of the world ? 

Here God reappears. “As for the real God,” 
says M. Vacherot, “he lives, he develops him- 
self in the immensity of space and in the eter- 
nity of time; he appears to us under the infinite 


* La Métaphysiaue et la science; vol. i, pp. xii, 1, vol. iii, 
p. 247. 


IMPIETY—PERPLEXITY, 387 


variety of forms which are his manifestations— 
he is Cosmos. ... The world thought of is some- 
thing else than the world imagined. ITmagina- 
tion represents to us the world as an immense 
mass of dispersed matter, as an infinite collection 
of forces disseminated in the vast fields of space. 
The idea does not occur to men of vulgar minds, 
nor even to our men of learning, that this image 
of universal life cannot for an instant support the 
glance of reason; they do not perceive that void 
is synonymous with nothing, that the atom is an 
unintelligible hypothesis; that being is always 
and everywhere, without any possible solution 
of continuity, either in time or in space; that 
the universal life is one in its apparent disper- 
sion ; and finally, that the world is a being, and 
not merely a whole.” * 

What is this if it be not Pantheism ? 

And these incoherences, these contradictions, 
these relapses of M. Vacherot into systems that 
he disavows, and that he has just combated, 


La Métaphysique et la science, vol. iii, p.247; vol. i, p. lii. 


388 IMPIETY—PERPLEXITY. 


what are they but striking evidences of the 
vanity of his efforts, like those of so many. 
others, to explain, unaided by God, God and 
the universe ? 

Of another nature is the cee of M. Ed- 
mond Scherer; his is the disquietude of the 
critic, not the embarrassment of the metaphy- 
sician. M. Edmond Scherer was a believing 
Christian, a believer zealous in his faith, and 
active in its cause. The examination of systems 
and of facts, historical criticism and philosoph- 
ical criticism, impelled him to skepticism ; not to 
that skepticism which is indifferent and strange 
to all personal conviction. M. Scherer believes 
in truth and in the rights of truth; but where 
that truth? He seeks it, he finds it not; he 
wanders among systems and facts as in a laby- 
rinth, discovering at each step that his path 1s 
the wrong one, and from it nevertheless finding 
no issue. He is still aware that humanity can- 
not live in a labyrinth, that it requires—nay, 


absolutely requires—to issue forth, to behold, 


IMPIETY—PERPLEXITY. 389 


or at least to catch glimpses of, the light of day. 
He has a sentiment of the moral requirements 
of human nature, of man’s life; and he sees well 
that the negations and the doubts of the differ- 
ent systems of philosophy can never satisfy 
those requirements. I have already cited, in 
the course of these Meditations, some of the pas- 
sages in which this perplexity strikingly man- 
ifests itself; a perplexity full at once of pride 
and. sadness, which, although it does not shake 
M. Scherer in his convictions, makes him never- 
theless see their vanity.* He knows that its 
own thought suffices not for the human soul; 
perhaps it is his own soul suggests to him that 
knowledge. | 
Why is it that Christianity, in spite of 
all the attacks which it has had to undergo, 
and all the ordeals through which it has been 
made to pass, has for eighteen centuries satisfied 


*See particularly the passage cited in the Third Meditation 
(Rationalism) of thisvolume, p. 256, etc., and in the “ Meditation 
on the Essence of the Christian Religion,” (Third Meditation, 
the Supernatural,) p, 119. 


390 IMPIETY—PERPLEXITY. 


infinitely better the spontaneous instincts and 
invincible cravings of humanity? Is it not be- 
caise it 1s pure from the errors which vitiate 
the different systems of philosophy just passed 
in review? because it fills up the void that 
those systems either create or leave in the 
human soul? because, in short, it conducts man 
higher to the fountain of light? Question par- 
amount, to which these J/editations are intended 
as the prelude, and which I shall essay to solve, 
by confronting, as I before said,* Christianity 
with its opponents, and by showing that, if it 
succeeds where they fail, the reason is, that, 
sprung from a higher source than man, it alone 
has the right to succeed, for it alone knows man 
rightly as he is—as one entire being; it alone 
satisfies man by furnishing him with a rule for 
his guidance through life. 


* First Meditation, p. 200. 


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But what ig far more important than the mode of composition is the spirit whica 
pervades the work. The author writes with that candid discrimination so essen- 
tial to the proper discussion of the topics which he handles.—Ed. of North. Adv. 


This work is a valuable acquisition to our Church literature. It embodies 
much important information, arranged in a natural and convenient form, and 
affords a good general outline of Methodism. It isa work of much merit. Ido 
cheerfilly commend it, as a whole, to the favorable consideration of our friends 
and the public generally.—T. Morris, Bishop of M. E. Church. 


I like the book much. It will do good. Our people and friends ought to read 
and study it thoroughly. It furnishes a catisfactory answer to the petty objec- 
tions urged against the Methodists by a set of ecclesiastical croakers with which 
we are everywhere beset. One gentleman, whom I let have a copy, after reading 
it carefully, remarked, “It is the book needed; I would not take twenty dollars 
for my copy if I could not obtain another.”’--Rev. Justin SPAULDING. 


I have just finished the reading of this book, and I wish to express my decided 
approbation of it. Jt should be a family book, a Sunday-school book, and I would 
add especially, a text-book for all candidates for the ministry.—J. T. Peck, D.D. 


The work throughout is not a criticism on Methodist usages, but a statement 
and defense of them. As such, we trust it will meet with the wide circulation it 
deserves, both in and out of the Church.—WMethodist Quarterly Review. 


We have examined the book, and most cordially recommend our friends, one 
and all, to procure it immediately. No Methodist can study it without profit, 
and gratitude to the great Head of the Church for the wisdom imparted to those 
who have been the instruments employed in constructing the rules and reguia- 
tions under which the operations of this most successful branch of the Church 
are conducted.—Editor of the Christian Guardian, Toronto. 


It is precisely the volume needed to instruct our people in the peculiarities of 
eur system. The special character of Methodism is here developed in such a 
manner as to show thatit is specially excellent, and worthy of special zeal and 
special sacrifices. It is very systematically arranged, and therefore convenient 
for reference on any given point. To the Methodist, especially the ‘ official" 
Methodist, this book is fitted to be a complete manual; and to ali others whe 
would understand what Methodism precisely is, as a whole, or in any specific 
respect, we commend Dr. Porter's work as an ACKNOWLEDGED AUTHORITY.— 
&. Brevens, LL.D. 


BOOKS PUBLISHED BY CARLTON & PORTER, 


200 Mulberry-street, New York. 


OOO ees 


5 —_—oworrernrnreaaae" 


Whedon’s Commentary. 


A CoMMENTARY ON THE GosPELs oF MATTHEW AND MARK, 
Intended for Popular Use. By D. D. WHEpon, D.D. 12mo. 


The first volume of this work has been on sale for the past year and 
2 large number of volumes have been sold. It is a 12mo. of 422 closely 
printed pages, embracing a fine map of Palestine, and other valuable il- 
lustrations. It is the cheapest book for the price that we have issued in 
many years. The New Testament will be completed in four similar 
volumes. A Commentary on the Old Testament, in uniform style, is in 
preparation. All the notices we have seen, as well as the remarks we 
have heard, go to the effect that this first volume is a timely, able, and 
valuable addition to our literature. 

Dr. Whedon has furnished the people with the results of critical study, 
modern travels, and Christian reflection, in brief and pithy comments 
on the difficult or obscure words and phrases in the first two Evangel- 
ists, enlarging on occasional passages of importance.— Congregational 
Herald. 

It gives the results of patient study, and the careful examination of the 
works of those who have preceded him in the same field, in few words 
well chosen.— Christ. Observer, Phila. 

Dr. Whedon is one of the clearest, strongest, and boldest writers in 
America. He addresses the intellect, not the passions; reason, not 
the feelings. The principal value of this commentary is found in expo- 
sition, while its real spiritual utility will depend much on the piety of the 
reader, and hence a boundless field is before him. Religious truths 
are presented in vivid distinctness; the popular mind is instructed. 
Richmond Christian Advocate. 

Dr. Whedon gives the sense of the sacred writers with great clearness 
and precision, and in the concisest manner. There is no parade of 
learning, and yet it is evident that only a profound scholar and phil- 
osophic thinker could produce such a work. We risk nothing in say- 
ing that it is superior to every other with which we are acquainted for 
“popular use.’’—Christian Guardian. 

We say to every Methodist minister, superintendent, and teacher, as 
well as others, purchase this valuable exposition without delay.-~ 
Canada Christian Advocate. 

Dr. Whedon has availed himself of recent works on Palestine for the 
illustration of Biblical allusions, and of the critical labors of the best 
scholars for the interpretation of the text. But in the commentary it- 
self, and in the argumentative development of a precept or doctrine, he 
shows the habit of independent thinking. Dr. Whedon’s Commentary 
is well worthy of study.—Wew York Independent. 


N. B.—A Question Book to the first volume of Whedon’s Com 
mentarv is in press. 


BOOKS PUBLISHED BY CARLTUN & PORTER, 
200 Mulberry-street, New York. 


Stevens's History of Methodism. 


The History of the Religious Movement of the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury, called Methodism, considered in its Different Denomina- 
tional Forms, and its Relations to British and American Prot 
estantism. By ABEL StEveNS, LL. D. 38 volumes. 


Large 12mo. 


A charming work—full of thrilling facts, combined and stated in the 
most interesting manner. The work has been read and highly indorsed 
Dy the most distinguished authors. One says, “It is wonderfully read- 
able;” and another, “I have been interested beyond measure.’ It will 
be a standard for all Methodists for all time to come, and will be read by 
thousands of Christians of other denominations. 

It contains a new steel engraving of Rey. Joun Wesxey, the best ever 
seen in this country. F 

The volumes which are to follow will be put up in the same style, se 
that those who get the whole will have uniform sets, though they buy bu: 
one volume at a time. 


Hymns and Tunes. 


Hymns for the Use of the Methodist Episcopal Church. With 
Tunes for Congregational Worship. 
8vo., pp. 868. 


« 


This work embraces all the hymns in our standard Hymn Book, and no 
more. Jt contains also more than three hundred of the most popular old 
and new tunes in print, and is offered at a very low price for a book of its 
cost, in the hope that it may be generally adopted. 


Autobiography of Peter Cartwright. 


Edited by W. P. StRICKLAND. 
12mo., pp. 525. 


This is one of the most interesting autobiographies of the age. The 
gale of this remarkable book has averaged two thousand copies per month 
since its appearance. Thirty-two thousand have been printed, and stil 
the orders come. It is useless to add anything by way of commendation. 
The people wil have it, and we are prepared to supply the continued 
demand. 


What must I do to be Saved? 


By JEssE T. Peck, D.D. 
18mo., pp. 192. 


A new revival book, written by request, designed to awaken the sinner, 
guide the penitent to Christ, and establish the young convert. 


BOOKS PUBLISHED BY CARLTON & PORTER, 


200 Mulberry-street, New York. 


aid 


Elements of Logic. 


Adapted to the Capacity of younger Students, and designed for 
Academies and the Higher Classes of Common Schools, Re- 
vised edition. By Rey. O. K. Trux, D.D. 


We are glad to see that this excellent hand-book is being introduced into many 
gehools and seminaries. If our friends connected with school committees through 
the country wil take a little pains they may introduce it into thousands of schools 
with advantage to all concerned. ‘ 

We believe that, with a treatise as simple as Dr. True’s, all college students might 
understand logic, and the higher classes of our academies and grammar schools be 
emboldened to study it; while the study of the treatises in ordinary use is now almost 
wholly confined to colleges, and the understanding of them to a small percentage 
of each class. We give the book, therefore, our cordial commendation. It is short 
and simple, not because it is shallow and superficial, but because the author has the 
mastery of his science, knows how it ought to be taught, perceives the utility of its 
study to all persons of intelligence and culture, and has adapted his presentation of it 
to this so desirable end.— North American Review, 

This is a thorough popular treatise on the Elements of Logie, the best undoubt 
edly in the market for schools and colleges. Those who have not had the advant- 
ages of schools would do well to give it a thorough study.—Zion’s Herald. 


Clergyman’s Pocket Diary and Visiting Book. 


Arranged by James Portsr, D.D. 


Hero we have an admirable memorandum book, the want of whicn has been feft, 
we venture to say, very generally by our ministerial brethren. It contains the fol 
lowing departments: Funerals attended, sermons preached, alphabetical list of mem- 
bers, alphabetical list of probationers, alphabetical list of friends not members, record 
of baptisms, record of marriages, subscribers for periodicals, cash accounts, general 
sceounts, general memorandum, ete.— Canada Christian Advocate, 


Parkerism ! 


Three Discourses delivered on the occasion of the Death of 
Tuoport Parker. By W. F. WARREN, Faves H. NewHall, 
and Girpert Haven. 

12mo. 

_ The discourses before us are worthy of being preserved in & permanent form. 

They were eiicited in consequence of the death of a man who had acquired a world- 

wide reputation. In this volume we have truthful delineations, clear conceptiona, 

and weighty arguments, and throughout there isa remarkable exemplification of Mr. 

Parker’s own words, namely, “I am no flatterer nor public liar general 5 when such 

a one is wanted he is easily found, and may be had cheap; and I cannot treat great 

men like great babies. So, when I preached on Mr. Adams, who had done the cause 

of freedom such great service, on General Taylor and Mr. Webster, I simed to paint 
aem exactly as they were, that their virtues might teach us and their vices warn.” 
~-Canada Christian Advocate, 


800KS PUBLISHED BY CARLTUN & PORTER, 


200 Mulberry-street, New York. 


NN ee oe eae 


OOO 


Fe NANA RRR AAS oO 


Whedon’s Commentary. 


A Commentary of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. Intended 
for Popular Use. By D. D. Wuexpon, D.D. 


12mo, 


The first volume of this work has been on sale for the past year and a large num 
ber of volumes have been soid. It is a 12mo. of 422 closely printed pages, embrac- 
tng a fine map of Palestine, and other valuable illustrations. It is the cheapest book 
for the price that we have issued in many years. The two volumes which are to 
follow will be announced in due time. All the notices we have seen, as well as the 
remarks we have heard, go to the effect that this book is a timely, able, and valua- 
dle addition to our literature. 

Dr. Whedon has furnished the people with the results of critical study, modern 
travels and Christian reflection, in brief and pithy comments on the difficult or ob 
secure words and phrases in the first two evangelists, enlarging on occasional passages 
of importance.—Congregationaé Herald. 

It gives the results of patient study and the careful examination of the works of 
those whe have preceded him in the same fieid, in few words well chosen.—Christ. 
Observer, Phila. 

Dr. Whedon is one of the clearest, strongest, and boldest writers in America, 
He addresses the intellect, not the passions; reason, not the feelings. The principal! 
value of this commentary is found in exposition, while its real spiritual utility will 
flepend much on the piety of the reader, and hence a boundless field is before him, 
Religious truths are presented in vivid distinctness; the popular mind is instructed, 
—Richmond Christ. Adv. 

So far as we have had opportunity to examine its expositions, we regard the work 
as well executed, and commend it to the Bible student.--Advocate and Guardian. 


Pronouncing Bible. / 


Large 8vo. 


Ws have lately issued the best Bible in print, a Pronouncine Bribie, having 
shese advantages: 1. The proper names are divided and accented, so that a child can 
pronounce them correctly. 2. Each book has a short introduction, showing just 
what every reader ought to know about it. 8, It has a much improved class of ref- 
erences. 4. It contains a map of Old Canaan and its surroundings, and one of Pal- 
gatine, according to the latest discoveries. 

The method is more simple and easy than any other we have seen. The pronun- 
siation marks are very judiciously confined to the proper names, leaving the re- 
mainder of the text unencumbered. The multitudes of Bible readers whe stumble 
at the hard names of people and places may find a very satisfactory relief by using 
this edition. For family worship, or private devotional reading, this edition has 
atrong recommendations.—Presbyterian. 

In this Bible the proper names are divided into syllables and accented, so that it ia 
hardly possible to mispronounce them. The “Introductions” are brief, but eon 
tain a large amount of useful and necessary information. The “references,” as far 
a8 we have had time to test them, are decidedly the most accurate we have met 
with. It is one of the most beautiful and complete Bibles in the world, and it wid 
be an acquisition to the study, the family, the Bible class and the pulpit, ~Zvanw 
gelical Witness, 


BOOKS PUBLISHED BY CARLTON & PORTER, 


200 Mulberry-street, New York. 


a a i i a a ae 


aN oOOlrOrOO—™ DO 


The Christian Maiden, 


Memorial: of Eliza Hessel. By Josuva Prizstixy. Slightly 
abridged from the second London edition. 


With a Portrait and Vignette. 12mo. 


Much of the religious biography of the day is both commonplace and insipid. 
Phere are, however, many choice exceptions, and among such we class the interesting 
memoir before us. Miss Hessel was a young lady who cultivated her mind to the 
atmost, and diffuse’ a cheering influence in the circle in which she moved. Her 
biography is replece with illustrations of her deep Christian experience, and varied 
and extensive reading. We cordially commend this little book to Christian young 
women, as well calculated to improve the understanding and purify the heart.— 
Christian Guardian. . 


The Pioneer Bishop ; 


Or, the Life and Times of Franois Aspury. By W. P. Srrick- 
LAND, D.D. 
12mo. 


One of the most fascinating volumes of biography ever issued from our press.— 
Quarterly Review. 

This is at once a charming volume and a marvelous record.—New York Com 
mercial Advertiser. 

This book will be read, and will exert a beneficial influence wherever read. 
—Zion's Herald. 

The author has performed his duty well, and with a catholicity of spirit worthy of 
honor.— New York Intelligencer. 

No one can have a just view of the rise and settlement of the Methodist Epis- 
eopal Chi.-sh in the United States without carefully perusing this book.—Dr. Durbin. 

We are glad to find the history of the father of American Methodism from the pew 
ef one so competent and fitted for the task.—Worthern Advocate. 


Early Methodism 


Within the Bounds of the Old Genesee Conference, from 1788 to 
1828; or, the first Forty Years of Wesleyan Evangelism in 
Northern Pennsylvania, Central and Western New York, and 
Canada; containing Sketches of Interesting Localities, Excit- 
ing Scenes, and Prominent Actors, By GEorGE Prox, D.D. 


12mo. 


Many valuable lessons are to be learned from the study of those heroic mep whe 
followed the sound of the woodman’s ax with the “joyful sound” of salvation, 
Fheir faith, self-denial, undaunted courage, and glorious success will never cease te 
gall forth our sincerest admiration, and may still, we trust, stimulate their successers 
to deeds of no»le daring.— Christian Guardian. 

It is a well-wrought production, and while important information is communicated 
to the reader, he ts attracted forward from page to page, and chapter to chapter, by 
pleasant skotches, stirring scones, and conspicuous actors.— Religious Heraht, 


~ 


sh 


ae 


. = a - ty ) : me a P 2 
BOOKS PUBLISHED BY CARLTON & PORTER, 
200 Mulberry-street, New York. 


Rudiments of Public Speaking and Debate. 


Or, Hints on the Application of Logic. By J. G. Horyoaxg, 
author of ‘“‘ Mathematics no Mystery,” ‘Logic of Facts,” etc. 
With an Essay on Sacred Eloquence by Henry Roexns, 
Revised, with Notes, by Rev. L. D. Barrows. 


12mo. 


oe a a ae 


* Speech is the body, thought the soul, and suitable aetion the lips of eloquence.” 
He has oratory who ravishes his hearers, while he forgets himself.—Lavater. 
Eloquence is vehement simplicity,—Cectl. y 


The object of this book is to assist public speakers in perfecting themselves in 
the art of speaking effectively. Too many exhaust themselves on the matter of 
their discourse, and utterly failin the manner of it. The tendency of this book is te 
correct this error, and secure a better and more impressive style. Please read the 
following notices of it: 

We cordially commend Dr. Barrows’s volume to all ministers, young and old. 
and in fact to public speakers of all classes. It is-full of marrow and fatness.— 
Western Advocate. 

A close study of it will save the young public speaker from many blunders 
which, if uncorrected, will impair his usefulness and hinder his success.—Northern 
Advocate. 

Our preachers will do well to send for it, A clergyman of great intellectual 
power, though being favored with little success, when asked how much of a sermon 
was due to the manner in which it was delivered, answered, “‘Three fourths.”— 
Christiam Advocate and Journal. ee 

There is nothing dry or dull in the entire book. It is full of most valuable sug 
gestions, so presented as to be remembered.— Congregational Herald. 

Here is a work of rare excellence. We have no hesitation in saying that it should 
be the text-book of the nation upon the subject of public speaking.— Philadelztia 
Daily News. 


Moral and Religious Quotations from the 
Poets. 


Topically Arranged. Comprising choice Selections from six 
hundred Authors. Compiled by Rev. Witr1am Rox, A.M. 


8vo, Sheep 

Halfcalf .. : 

Superfine, illustrated, tinted paper, morocco, gilt 
Morocco, antique 


Woe havo seen many dictionaries of quotations, but this surpasses them all in extent 
amd system. The subjects are those that come before the preacher’s mind, and he 
will open this book as he is preparing a sermon, and find happy lines to adorn and 
enrich his discourse, and astonish his hearers by his familiarity with the poets! I° 
will also lesd him to the study of poetry, and introduce him to authors whose ae- 
guaintanco he would never have cultivated, but for these brief and sententious ex- 
tracts from their works, More than four thousand quotations are hore male.—Neee 

York Observer. 


Date Due 


ahr OOP, 


